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June 14 - June 21, 2023
Ignorance is trust.
few things are more familiar, he supposed, than finding oneself a stranger.
And as pompous as they were, they deferred to him, not the way men accede to rank or station, but the way men yield to those who possess something they need.
The relief he experienced every evening, he realized, had nothing to do with fatigue, and everything to do with standing still …
Great decisions, he reflected, were measured by their finality as much as by their consequences.
Regret is the opiate of fools.
If men must spare women the world, then women must spare men the truth—
“And ‘barbarity,’ I fear, is simply a word for unfamiliarity that threatens.”
When one believed, one’s soul was moved. When one didn’t, everything else moved.
Mystery made things titanic. Knowledge made small.
With the accumulation of power, Achamian had once said, comes mystery. An old Nilnameshi proverb. When Kellhus had asked what the proverb meant, the Schoolman had said it referred to the paradox of power, that the more security one exacted from the world, the more insecure one became.
What came before determined what came after … This was the basis of the Probability Trance.
War is where the sandal of the world meets the scrotum of men.”
“Mockery is a gift between friends. A gift.”
All men were caste-merchants in some respect, haggling and trading, but without scales or touchstones to confirm the weight or purity of their coinage. They had only guesswork. Backbiting, petty jealousies, resentments, arguments, and third-party arbitrations simply belonged to the market of men.
Intelligence, as penetrating as any in near or far antiquity. Compassion, as broad as Inrau’s and yet somehow far deeper—a benevolence born of understanding rather than forgiveness, as though he could see through the delinquent rush of thought and passion to the still point of innocence within each soul.
“But not all seeing,” Kellhus replied, “is witness.”
“Witness is the seeing that testifies, that judges so that it may be judged. You saw, and you judged. A trespass had been committed, an innocent had been murdered. You saw this.” “Yes!” the man hissed. “A little girl. A little girl!” “And now you suffer.” “But why?” he cried. “Why should I suffer? She’s not mine. She was heathen!” “Everywhere … Everywhere we’re surrounded by the blessed and the cursed, the sacred and the profane. But our hearts are like hands, they grow callous to the world. And yet, like our hands even the most callous heart will blister if overworked or chafed by something
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“Yes, rejoice! The callused hand cannot feel the lover’s cheek. When we witness, we testify, and when we testify we make ourselves responsible for what we see. And that—that—is what it means to belong.”
glory comes in joy and sorrow.
The most powerful flatteries dwelt not in what was said but in the assumptions behind what was said.
Most men would rather die in deception than live in uncertainty.
To listen to him, it seemed, was to learn what one already knew without knowing.
You understand little because to learn you must admit you know nothing.”
He’d exceeded his daily ration of idiots.
he’d thought it simply had to be enough to be a good man. And if it wasn’t enough, then there was nothing good about those who measured good and evil.
And he would seize them, love and hope. He would seize them, and he would hold them fast.
But to open a book was by far the more profound gamble. To open a book was not only to seize a moment of helplessness, not only to relinquish a jealous handful of heartbeats to the unpredictable mark of another man’s quill, it was to allow oneself to be written. For what was a book if not a long consecutive surrender to the movements of another’s soul?
“You ungrateful, arrogant, little pissant!”
But knowing and witnessing were two different things.
“This is why cnamturu, vigilance, is a leader’s greatest virtue. The field must be continually read. The signs must be judged and rejudged.
They each thought themselves the absolute measure of all others.
overcome by the motherly weariness of having to console those who suffered far less than herself.
His voice seemed satin thunder. He looked as eternal as a circle.
The Poet will yield up his stylus only when the Geometer can explain how Life can at once be a point and a line. How can all time, all creation, come to the now? Make no mistake: this moment, the instant of this very breath, is the frail thread from which all creation hangs. That men dare to be thoughtless …
Those at the centre of things were always more inflexible, always more invested, than those at the edges.
Doubt had made them, and doubt would unmake them.
“Because men want their gold and their glory. Because they want beliefs that answer to their fears, their hatreds, and their hungers.”
“When one race,” Kellhus continued, “is tributary to another, as the Cepalorans are to the Nansur, whose tongue do both races speak?” “The tongue of the conqueror.” “And whose tongue do you speak?” She swallowed. “The tongue of men.”
To be punished was the lot of the faithful.
The shortcomings of men—their limits—were written in the eyes of those who watched them. And this was why everyone seemed so desperate to secure the good opinion of others—why everyone played the mummer.
“Torment teaches,” the poet Protathis wrote, “what love has forgotten.”
“possessing in dispossession.”
“You turn to fury in the absence of certainty,”
Something—demon or reptile—crawled into the skulls of those who endured the unendurable, and when it looked out their eyes, as it inevitably did, it could recognize itself in others.
Hope was never so poison as when it deluded loved ones.
For all of us parse and ration our words, pitch them to the ears of the listener.
The secret of battle. Indomitable conviction. Unconquerable belief.
