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We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.
The lights of the oubliette are of that ancient kind that is said to burn forever, though some have now gone out.
“Is that what you call it? The Atrium of Time? Because of the dials, I suppose.” “No, the dials were put there because we call it that.
I was miserable before I knew I was no longer happy, and bowed with responsibility when I did not yet fully understand I held it.
One can’t found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction.
“Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real. What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it?”
In order that the guild should not be accused of having detained me without legal process, the door was left unlocked; but there were two journeymen with swords outside my door,
It is said that it is the peculiar quality of time to conserve fact, and that it does so by rendering our past falsehoods true.
No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death—every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.
We say, “I will,” and “I will not,” and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.
Perhaps when night closes our eyes there is less order than we believe. Perhaps, indeed, it is this lack of order we perceive as darkness, a randomization of the waves of energy (like a sea), the fields of energy (like a farm) that appear to our deluded eyes—set by light in an order of which they themselves are incapable—to be the real world.
By the use of the language of sorrow I had for the time being obliterated my sorrow—so powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.
Those ages that have outlawed it (and many hundreds have, by my reading) have replaced it largely with murder—and with just such murders, by and large, as monomachy seems designed to prevent: murders resulting from quarrels among families, friends, and acquaintances. In these cases two die instead of one, for the law tracks down the slayer (a person not by disposition a criminal but by chance) and slays him, as though his death would restore his victim’s life.
there was a madness in his dull eyes, a shadow of some half-suppressed concern that had worn itself out in the prison of his mind until all its eagerness was gone and only its energy remained.
Justice is a high thing, and that night, when I lay beside Dorcas listening to the rain, I was young, so that I desired high things only.
Life, after all, is not a high thing, and in many ways is the reverse of purity. I am wise now, if not much older, and I know it is better to have all things, high and low, than to have the high only.
A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart.
“Many of the people were angry at the building of that citadel, holding it to be their right to slay their lords without hindrance if they so desired.
Lol
I’ve followed it for years and years now, though the battles they fight never seem to make much difference, if you understand me. It never seems to get much closer to us, or much farther off either. What I’ve always supposed was that our Autarch and theirs appoints a spot to fight in, and when it’s over they both go home. My wife, fool that she is, don’t believe there’s a real war at all.”
That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
I hope you will forgive her—and me. We had heard you were dead. MESCHIA: That requires no apology. Most are, after all.
If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind us?
That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
