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We surround ourselves in luxuries as though decadence and wealth will stave away the true concerns of the world for a time. Perhaps they do.
In faraway Hyspia, they married them off at her age. Of course, if they tried that in Valengrad, we cut their dicks off.
We look for the strings that lead back into our pasts and follow them as though what lies behind us is the secret to passing through the labyrinth. Those things that sleep in our wake seem simpler, to be cherished for it, because all of the confusion of our lives has been washed from them.
If you fear getting older, then you’re losing every second of your life,
No matter how high you are in life, a woman can always give you that same disapproving look and make you want to improve. It is in such looks that life is given meaning.
It is a bad idea to promise things to children. Adults, having seen dozens of them shattered, understand that circumstances change and that a promise is, at best, confirmation of what you intend in the moment. A child remembers a promise through all seven hells and will hold you to it, strong as chains.
Individual people can be highly intelligent, but put them into a mob and they change. They become something else. Something really, really fucking stupid.
But we run when we can run, and we fight when we have to, and sometimes the dawn comes and there’s no choice but to grit your teeth, draw steel and scream against the night.
The drudge word for love had connotations of obedience, servitude, worship, adulation. All the worst parts. It carried nothing of kinship, of affection, of respect.
Children command every room they enter. There is something built into us that insists they come before all else, and I had only come to understand that too late.
But ultimately, when it comes to argument, facts don’t matter. The truth doesn’t matter. People will believe what they want to believe because it works in the artificial reality that they have created for themselves.
We spend our lives worrying about the future, paranoid about the things that may come to pass and upset the delicately balanced structures of our lives. We fear the failure of the harvest, or that our tryst will be discovered, or that our child will be born without eyes or missing a limb. All of that worrying, all the energy we pour into unnerving ourselves, the truth is that it comes to nothing, and it never sees off the real troubles. They erupt, sudden and unexpected, but so obvious, to blindside us and take our worlds, spin them around and leave them different, changed.
