Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

When the worst thing that can possibly happen to you finally happens, you find that you are not afraid of anything.

Life becomes significantly less stressful when you accept that your ignorance will always dwarf your knowledge.”

He wanted to scream, but he was good at not screaming. He spent most of his time not screaming even though he wanted to.

Kaev smiled, unsure what to say. But it wasn’t the normal pain of being bewildered by words in general, of even the smallest thing being too big for him to find the words for. It felt good, right, the bliss of emotions that need not be put into words. Had he ever truly had a conversation before? Had he ever been able to talk to another human being without watching every sentence crumble on its way out of his mouth? If so, he didn’t remember it.

The body has a way of thinking that is very different from the mind’s.

You can win against people. You can’t win against money. Money is a monster, a shape-shifting hydra whose heads you can never cut off. Money can only behave one way.”

Music is the common property of all humanity, but people come from particular groups. For as long as the song lasts, for as long as they say nothing, you can pretend you are part of the same group.

Every city is a war. A thousand fights being fought between a hundred groups.

Stories are where we find ourselves, where we find the others who are like us. Gather enough stories and soon you’re not alone; you are an army.

Rage is a hard armor to wear indefinitely,

What was the point of rising to the top? Conquest had always seemed like its own goal, but what did one do when one got there?

It took a special sort of insanity to run for public office. A fragile megalomania; a delusional ego.

We want villains. We look for them everywhere. People to pin our misfortune on, whose sins and flaws are responsible for all the suffering we see. We want a world where the real monstrosity lies in wicked individuals, instead of being a fundamental facet of human society, of the human heart. Stories prime us to search for villains. Because villains can be punished. Villains can be stopped. But villains are oversimplifications.

If you know someone, know them completely and utterly, does that automatically mean you love them?

Divide and conquer has been the foundation of human societal power dynamics for as long as there have been human societies.”

“That’s the great gift of living life as a nomad—you don’t get attached to things, don’t believe that you’re safe because you have a roof over your head today. You don’t put your faith in a physical space when home is something you can take with you. But it also means that you accept what comes your way. You make the most of the places you end up in. And now we’re here.