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“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.
We have little control over our ends, and none over what passes beyond them. But if we live well and truly, those who follow on may remember us for our lives and not our deaths.
But we are not bodies. We have bodies. And though who we are is rooted in that animal matter we rise higher, growing like a tree toward heaven. I can think of no greater evil than the insistence that we are only meat.
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.
Talking to it was not like speaking with any human in my experience. There was no presence to it, nothing of the sort that might cause the hair to stand on end, the skin to crawl. It was dead space. Shape without form. Shade without color.
I do not know what it says of a man that he might linger for hours before a painting of a garden and yet ignore the flowers themselves—but such am I.
Joy is rare, a thing always of the now, existing without regard for time past or time future, and without depending on them.
Pure freedom isn’t so good. You need constraints. You need to know which way to sail, you need to know how far you can sail with whatever meager supplies—abilities—you have.”
I sensed that it would be disaster for me to try and speak then, and I held myself to stillness, thinking of my father—of Kharn Sagara—and the way they used time to draw words from others.
Who can guess the motives of gods and devils? Not I. I cannot often understand even the motivations of men.
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.
Who must stand when those whose duty is standing have gone? Those who can.
“You grew this?” I asked, astonished. “I am the Lord of Vorgossos,” Sagara replied. “I grow armies. Arms are easy.”
