The Fall of Babel (The Books of Babel #4)

by Josiah Bancroft

Even experience was not without disadvantage because as complacency dulled one’s vigilance, longevity inflated one’s sense of permanence.

And it occurred to him that the only approval he’d never courted, and certainly never won, was his own.

Soon, his hands were overloaded with so much silverware, he began to leave a trail behind him.

Like the hods leave for the nebos?

all the little worries that come in with the moths at night.

the human race came into the world with all the physical prowess of a custard and all the independence of a pimple.

“Then one day, they finally do escape, and you don’t feel free. You just feel left behind.”

The prospect of obsessing about the future so much seems, I don’t know, naive.

A commanding voice in the ear of a simple mind is old magic,

First, the masses must be coddled and made beholden, then given no alternative, and at last, when their fear is as potent as awe, they will have forgotten any illusion that they were ever my equal.

evil never grew up.

“You know I don’t have a taste for blood, but if you have the opportunity to reason with Marat, to hear his sympathetic explanations for these horrific machinations, please don’t. Don’t listen. Kill him. He will never coexist with the human race because he is a race of one. He does not believe in us. He believes in nothing and no one outside himself. He is a fire burning through the world: If you let him go, he will not repent; he will just burn hotter and make more ash.”

the more distant you grow from everyone else, the stranger you become to yourself.

difficult news and confusing information were sometimes best imparted and absorbed while busy with some unrelated chore.

all stages of human development came with both difficulty and opportunity.

understanding nothing, or very little of the world, and having no desire to understand more than you already do, well, that invites entitlement. What was a privilege becomes a right. And that, I think, is dangerous.”