Howling Dark (Sun Eater #2)

by Christopher Ruocchio

The rightly tuned mind does not deny its emotions, but floats with them. It accepts what it feels and so incorporates that feeling to itself. Thus the mind is not subject, but rules itself.

“It’s all right to be sad,” he said in that serious way of his; all eyebrows. “It’s all right to be angry or sick or scared, or whatever it is you’re feeling. But you can’t let it crush you, all right?”

“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.

Funny thing about lessons: the idiot student thinks when he is given a little fact that he owns it—that two and two is always four no matter the circumstance. Just as it was not true for Orwell, it is not true for anyone.

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.

Not because they are evil—though that is also true. But because they are not us.

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.

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.

We trade the mythology of childhood for knife-edged reality and call it truth, forgetting that there are deep truths, and deeper magics in our universe.

Those lost to us do not return, nor the years turn back. Rather it is that we carry a piece of those lost to us within ourselves, or on our backs.

“When you have seen enough of other people, you will learn that it is they who believe their lives are meaningless. Why should I value them, who do not value themselves?”

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. One may be part of a community. One is an individual.

Rather sleep is the nurse of life, for often in sleep we are healed of the hurts we suffer and so find new life again.