Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater, #1)

by Christopher Ruocchio

But in the same way that close reading allows the reader to absorb, to synthesize the truth of what he reads, drawing allows the artist to capture the soul of a thing.

The artist sees things not in terms of what is or might be, but in terms of what must be. Of what our world must become. This is why a portrait will—to the human observer—always defeat the photograph. It is why we turn to religion even when science objects and why the least scholiast might outperform a machine.

The photograph captures Creation as it is; it captures fact. Facts bore me in my old age. It is the truth that interests me, and the truth is in charcoal—or in the vermilion by whose properties I record this account. Not in data or laser light. Truth lies not in rote but in the smal...

We live in stories, and in stories, we are subject to phenomena beyond the mechanisms of space and time. Fear and love, death and wrath and wisdom—these are as much parts of our universe as light and gravity. The ancients called them gods, for we are their creatures, shaped by their winds. Sift the sands of every world and sort the dust of space between them, and you will find not one atom of fear, nor gram of love nor dram of hatred. Yet they are there, unseen and uncertain as the smallest quanta and just as real. And like the smallest quanta, they are governed by principles beyond our control.

Civilization is a kind of prayer: that by right action we might bring to pass the peace

and quiet that is the ardent desire of every decent heart.

“The world’s soft the way the ocean is. Ask any sailor what I mean. But even when it is at its most violent, Hadrian . . . focus on the beauty of it. The ugliness of the world will come at you from all sides. There’s no avoiding it. All the schooling in the universe won’t stop that.”

Joy is a wind, Hadrian. It will pick you up only to smash you against the rocks again.

And yet we are quick to overlook the quiet revelations, the moments that dawn not from the chaos of the world but from a hollow seed in the pit of one’s stomach.

We like to imagine it is easy to rise, to stand. To be a hero. It is not.

Life is never about what we deserve. I do not know if there is a God, be it Mother Earth or the icona or one of the uncreated gods of old, but if there is, God alone may dispense perfect justice. It is not to be had in our fallen world.

I had made a choice, and I have made several choices since. That is all we can ever do, then live by our choices and by their consequences.

The fool believes the iniquities of the world are the fault of other men. Gibson’s voice, dry as old manuscript pages, had never been more clear. The truly wise try to change themselves, which is the more difficult and less grand task.

Strange, the way the larger world casts its shadow on our own, our moments fleeting and small when measured against the roaring thrust of time.

The man who hopes for the future delays its arrival, and the man who dreads it summons it to his door.

It is strange to think that those dear to us were at one time strangers. Another person in a sea of faces. It is stranger still to think that we would meet them again gladly, even knowing all the pain our meeting would bring.

Eternity is in silence. It is in the quiet of the world, in the darkness and solitude of the heart.

Always speak to one in a crowd, my father often said. A crowd can ignore you, but a man cannot.