Howling Dark (The Sun Eater #2)

by Christopher Ruocchio

The actor knows he is on stage. The character knows there is no stage.

Like Dante, I stood upon the edge of a dark forest, where the true path was lost . . . and here was the wolf, slavering, on the hunt, and ready to drive me into darkness. Where the leopard and the lion were then I did not know.

“Sad is like a big ocean, and you can’t breathe deep down. You can float on it, you can swim a little, but be careful. Grief is drowning. Grief is deep water.

True lessons require not only knowing, but that the student practices his knowledge again and again. Thus knowledge becomes us, and we become more than the animal and the machine. That is why the best teachers are students always, and the best students are never fully educated.

Sometimes, it is only nature who is cruel, not mankind.

Man’s inhumanity. What could be more human?

Critics of the oldest stories used to say that men believe women to be goals, prizes to be won or bought. They did not understand. No man could think such a thing and remain a man, for to love is in part the attempt to become a creature worthy of love.

But every garden has its snake, and every light its shadow.

But nothing is beautiful because it lasts.

The desire was there—but not the plan—and he who desires without a plan is like the man who leaps from a high place, though his hands are bound.

“How’s Pallino taking it?” “Same as ever, really,” Switch said. “Stoic son of a bitch. Nothing makes him blink.” “Well,” I said dryly, “he only has one eye. He can’t blink.”

Always forward, always down, and never left or right.

Xenophobia. That was what they called it. Fear of the other. It’s the wrong word.

Reader, there are other devils than Man. And by our evolved reason we may be sure of understanding human devils only.

every thought had by every philosopher and scholiast, every scientist and priest, is framed by the human mind. Do not mistake me. I do not dismiss facts. But that two and two are four requires first that a mind has conceptualized two as two and four as four, and understands addition. Of this, there is no guarantee.

There are two sorts of men. One hears an order from his better and obeys. The other sees order in himself and obeys that. All men obey something, even if it is only themselves.

It is well that the human mind sees only a little of the world, and better that it is bounded by our petty senses.

“Beware Greeks bearing gifts,”

Strange what the mind abridges, strange what it retains, and stranger still what it invents. Mythologizes.

Have you ever walked by night for the first time in a place too familiar to you by day? Have you felt the darkness and the light of stars and moons transmute that comfortable place into somewhere threatening and strange?

The line was drawn—as lines are always drawn—in that shade of red which no careful scribe may wipe away.

But it is always easier to spend what is not yours to give.

We believe our fear destroyed by new bravery. It is not. Fear is never destroyed. It is only made smaller by the courage we find after. It is always there.

It is easy for those without wealth to pretend at morality, as if they would not themselves make depraved choices given the means. There is no morality in poverty. It is only that wealth gives the immoral greater opportunity for abuse.

There thickly lay the frozen years, so that the very air seemed a kind of amber, and I the prisoned fly.

To no one in particular—to the memory of the moment past—I said, “I was worried about you, too.”

There was a strength in her clean limbs and an urgency that scattered my legion and left a single, one-eyed soldier at attention.

Ha! I did not catch this the first time reading.

There was iron in her. Arguing with her was like arguing with a scalpel.

Those who say stories are only stories are only fools.

I have never forgotten her smile then or the sound of her voice. It was . . . a perfect moment, cut as crystal from the cloth of time. I was only an observer, and so felt I should be elsewhere, as if I were intruding like a storm cloud on midsummer’s eve.

Devotion requires an attachment which tends to vice if you let it. Thus the devoted is made a slave to his devotions. Such love wears chains.

The machines the Mericanii built enslaved mankind in turn, and would have killed us—nearly killed us—but for the action of William of Avalon and his faithful knights.

I saw my Cassandra sparring with the Maeskoloi by the light of Jadd’s red sun.

Interesting….

The price of life is death. With what will you pay, Halfmortal?

There are always choices, and it is ofttimes precisely those limitations—those un-freedoms—which show them to us.

“Do you know what the problem with a leash is?” I mused, propping my chin on one hand. “You’re left holding the other end of it.”

IT IS ONLY WHEN the world places no burdens on our hearts that circumstance allows us time to make decisions. By contrast, too often when there is some trial which we would give the price of a palatinate to avoid, we find we are already at court.

The world is filled with monsters: dragons in the wilderness, serpents in the garden. We must become monsters to fight them. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never really had to fight for anything.

You cannot twice step into the same river,

Each of us contains multitudes, but it is not that we are cells in the body of humankind. Rather we are clay, shaped as the mountain is shaped: by the wind, the tramping foot, and the rain. By the world. The mark of other hands is on us, but we are ourselves alone.

Fear is death to reason.

A man is the sum of his memories—and more—he is the sum of all those others he has met, and what he learned from them. And that is an encouraging thought, for that knowledge and those memories survive and are part of us through every storm, and every little death.

“I told you,” she said, “ones that can devour the stars. Set worlds on fire. Things they built for the Foundation War. Engines that make cold. Weapons that can truly destroy matter and tear the fabric of space. Weapons even Father doesn’t understand.”

“The machines had been built by men who had little use for such things, being like machines themselves. So they built new men, men without chests, Father says. Men made stupid by the machines to serve their designs. That’s what frightened the rest of us, like I said. That’s what started the war.”