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“Power dictates acceptability,” Kitay mused. “If the capital had been built in Tikany, I’m sure we’d be running around dark as wood bark.”
But the misery she felt now was a good misery. This misery she reveled in, because she had chosen it for herself.
Achievement was a high. Failure was worse than withdrawal.
“I have taught her class the crushing sensation of disappointment and the even more important lesson that they do not matter as much as they think they do.”
He was so convinced of his own rationality, of his encyclopedic knowledge of most things, that he had difficulty conceiving of gaps in his understanding.
Some truths could be learned through memorization, like history textbooks or grammar lessons. Some had to be ingrained slowly, had to become true because they were an inevitable part of the pattern of all things.
“But how can you borrow power from the gods when you don’t understand what they are?”
She was so terrified of the thought of not thinking that she wasn’t able to accomplish it because she kept thinking about not thinking.
When man begins to think that he is responsible for writing the script of the world, he forgets the forces that dream up our reality.
“What does it matter? They’re coming, and we’re staying, and at the end of the day whoever is alive is the side that wins. War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.”
Children ceased to be children when you put a sword in their hands. When you taught them to fight a war, then you armed them and put them on the front lines, they were not children anymore. They were soldiers.
