Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater, #1)

by Christopher Ruocchio

But perhaps you will read on, tempted by the thought of reading the work of so great a monster as the one made in my image.

Dangerous things, names. A kind of curse, defining us that we might live up to them, or giving us something to run away from.

“There’s no correlation between the orderliness of one’s work space and that of its mind.”

A silence. A profound, echoing quiet. Not a quiet in the ears but in the mind. The crowd—for it was a singular being—was shouting to drown out the loud silence in their souls.

“You know these things, but you haven’t learned them.”

thinking that there is only power and that civilization arises only from the abuse of the innocent by the powerful.

Focus blurs, Gibson used to say. Focus blinds. You must take in all of a thing by seeing the totality of it, not by focusing on minutiae. This is as important for a ruler as it is for a painter.

We believe our lives are coherent things. That they have meaning. Direction. Weft. That there is a purpose to us as there is a purpose to a player in a drama. That, I think, is the soul of religion, why so many people I have met—even my own brother—believe the world must be controlled, the universe planned and guarded. How comforting it is to imagine that there is a reason for all things. Millions of theologians and magi, the cult-priests of a thousand dead gods, have taught this lesson. Cat taught me something else, dying in that storm drain for no reason at all.

Courage is the first virtue of fools, the patron of those too afraid to run.

others spent as if they had not thought to see tomorrow. I thought of little else.

In the face of ignorance I’ve often found that silence is the best tutor.

is a mistake to believe we must know a thing to be influenced by it. It is a mistake to believe the thing must even be real.