Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)

by Ada Palmer

Let us create a new creature! Not a preacher, but a teacher, who hears a parishioner’s questions and presents the answers of all the faiths and sects of history, Christians and pagans, Muslims and atheists, all equal. With this new creature as his guide, let each man pick through the fruits of all theologies and anti-theologies, and make from them his own system, to test, improve, and lean on all the years of his long life.

Cielo de Pájaros is a success because it was the first city designed for those who don’t like city centers, whose perfect evening is spent by a window, watching gulls and black waves crashing down. What need is there for bustle in a city built for bash’es who prefer to be alone?

The Simile of the Three Insects was originally about knowledge, not wealth. Our age’s founding hero, Gordian Chairman Thomas Carlyle, stole the simile from Sir Francis Bacon, the founding hero of another age five hundred years before. In Bacon’s 1620 version the ant was not yet the corporation, stripping land and people to hoard wealth within its vaults, but the encyclopedist, heaping knowledge into useless piles, adding nothing new. The spider was not yet the geographic nation, snaring wealth and helpless citizens within the net of its self-spun borders, but the dogmatist spinning webs of philosophy out of the stuff of his own mind, without examining empirical reality. Bacon’s ideal, his scientist, was then the honeybee, which harvests the fruits of nature and, processing them with its inborn powers, produces something good and useful for the world.

There is no more shame in reusing such a rich inheritance than in knowing other kings’ hands held this sword before you drew it from the stone.

«The Patriarch wrote that the halfwit is always happier than the philosopher, but the philosopher would not trade knowledge for ignorance, not for all the happiness in the world.

The firebrand who spread Reason’s light across the Earth, battled intolerance, religious persecution, torture, forced kings to bow before the Rights of Man, and introduced wit into philosophy again?

Danaë—this monster from a more barbaric time—always remembers the protocols of servitude.

right now i’m tracking nine variables with sight, ten with hearing, five really complicated ones with taste and smell, nine with tactile, six with temperature, and eighteen with nerves your body would use for pain, but mine are totally reregistered, not unpleasant at all, so none of that crap about torture, it isn’t torture, it’s a sense, I just cultivated it differently, same as when kids learn music early, or languages, it’s all different ways of cultivating brain growth.>

His new word ‘vocateur’ (one who calls) was born to remind us that a person with a strong vocation is not a victim driven helplessly to toil, but a lucky soul whose work is also pleasure, and to whom thirty, forty, fifty hours are welcome ones.

No nation, whatever its power, can be called great when it imposes tyranny upon its citizens—worse, upon people it claims as its citizens, not because they have enjoyed the fruits of its soil, or benefitted from its protections, but because by chance their grandparents were born within that blotch of color on a map it calls its own.

I think there is no person, myself aside, so hated by the ambitious of this world as Bryar Kosala, since those who fight viciously to grasp the reins of power cannot forgive the fact that she could rise so high and still be nice.

What we choose means more than what is handed to us by chance.

As when a mountain climber on some cloud-locked peak grows so weary that he forgets the world around him in the pain, and pull, and pain, and pull, aware of nothing but his muscles, fog, and stone, but then suddenly a bright wind sweeps the clouds aside, and there open the boundless blue heavens, the sentinel heads of mountains thrusting through the fog floor, and the climber gasps as he sees, sovereign up above, the terrible, all-giving Sun, so Carlyle gasped at the sight of Bridger.

A constellation of Utopians is a group which only seems a group to us because we seek familiar institutions in their government, as we use the shapes of beasts and heroes to make false sense of the sea of stars.

I am the window through which you watch the coming storm. He is the lightning.

That fire within myself, which I had mistaken for common passion, was in reality the first dim flickering of the truer flame of spiritual devotion which, if fed with the good fuel of discipline and virtue, might be cultivated into some semblance of that ethereal brightness which marks mankind as the most fortunate of beasts, for we alone of all the creatures of this Earth may aspire to the understanding of the Divine.