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“They all smell like piss. It’s not a good salve if it doesn’t smell like piss.”
“Ain’t kindness if you have to pay for it,”
“Questions are swords and answers are shields,”
Meat didn’t get a say on whose hook it hung from.
Sharp rather than frail, as if age were a whetstone.
while we’re worrying about the sword, we may miss the spear.
“I didn’t go there expecting to succeed. I went there knowing I would die.” “Then why go at all?” “Because I couldn’t have lived with the guilt of having not tried.”
“That name runs ahead of me. It straightens crooked paths, and it’s the crooked paths I wish to walk.”
It’s like God forgot to stop making you.”
she wore her silence comfortably.
Some songs weren’t mere songs. They were memories curled tight and set alight.
“Anger makes good men stubborn and stubborn men petty.
Arent Hayes was a zealot. His religion was Samuel Pipps.
Sammy always said to hold on to what you knew until you understood what it meant.
The rich mistakenly believed their wealth was a servant, delivering them whatever they wanted.
every land was the same. Strength was the only currency of merit, and power was the only goal. Kindness, compassion, and empathy were trampled, exploited as weakness.
People gave the heavens a voice so they had something to ask for a better harvest, a healthy child, or a milder winter. God was hope, and mankind needed hope the way it needed warmth, food, and ale.
“Ghosts are God’s problem. The living must deal with me,”
The past was filled with sharp things,
Society is built upon contracts, upon the promises we make to each other and the coin we pay for them.
A broken cobweb betrayed somebody’s passing, while the sticky silk on their shoulder told who it was.
A soldier’s job is to end up dead far from home, fighting for a king who wouldn’t give them the crumbs from his table.”
“Thing about grief is that every death makes the pile lighter,”
“One death is heavier than ten, and a hundred are weightless.
The weak shouldn’t have to fear the powerful, and the powerful shouldn’t simply be allowed to take what they wanted without consequence.
Power should be a burden, not a shield. It should be used to everybody’s betterment, not merely for the person who wielded it.
Hard questions were best wrapped in soft words,
caging humanity with want, persuading them to buy their manacles new every month.
too much skin on too little skull.
The strings were made of sunlight, and the wood was so polished, she could see her own reflection swimming on its surface, like a soul caught under its skin.
Wealth was a key and poverty was a prison,
“Courage isn’t an absence of fear,” cried out Sara. “It’s the light we find when fear is all there is.
Guilt was like dirt. It got under the skin and didn’t come clean. It made people second-guess everything that was done, find fault where there was none, and imagine mistakes that weren’t made.
Marriage is an inconvenient convenience. It’s the shackle we accept for our safety.”
“Power changes people,
his past had swallowed his present and was now coiling around his future.
He felt like he was trying to build a vase by spitting out bits of broken pottery.
what use was his pain to those who needed his help?
“Surviving isn’t winning. It’s what you do when you’ve lost.
Fear was too brittle a material to make good decisions from.
memory grew nails and began scratching at her.
