The Heart of What Was Lost (Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, #3.5)

by Tad Williams

When you discover a flaw in stone, do not examine only the flaw, but how it formed, what it will do if left alone, and how the stone around it has responded. Do not neglect what beauty may have been created—if there were no flaws in order, life would be immeasurably poorer.”

“It is one thing to win,” said the duke. “It is another to convince your enemies that they have lost.”

We owe correct outward behavior to our inferiors, his mother had always told him, but even more to ourselves. When we think of what is right, we can be what is right.

Wars don’t end, he thought suddenly. They become stories, told to children. They become causes that are taken up by those who were not even born when the war started. But they don’t end.

For the first time in his life, Viyeki wondered if his people’s eagerness to be ruled by a greater power than themselves might in truth be a sort of weakness, in the same way that over-hardened witchwood lacked flexibility and thus was more easily broken.

We survive. But when survival is the only goal, what do the survivors become?