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September 1 - September 19, 2025
feeling unready, incompetent, old, as she always felt with other people. Alone, she only felt old when she was overtired or ill. Maybe living alone was the right thing for her after all.
Their passion was trapped in the hatred of the old.
always there was a war to be fought in the name of Peace, Freedom, Justice, the Lord.
She felt pleased with him and with herself.
pleased with herself, her decisiveness, her unanswerability.
He has said that before, Yoss thought. It has become his stock answer, his standard myth.
Enar had taken up his sword to kill his Elder Brother on that battlefield, to keep him from becoming Lord of the World. And Kamye had told him that the sword he held was his own death; that there is no lordship and no freedom in life, only in the letting go of life, of longing, of desire.
I want a wood fire, Yoss thought. A flame leaping and crackling, a story-telling fire,
Defeats were minimised, losses were not made up, skimmers, pods, weapons, men were not replaced. By the end of Teyeo’s seventh year, the Army on Yeowe had been essentially written off by its government.
finally began to bring their soldiers home.
Why had they been left there to be hunted down and slaughtered? Why had the government not sent them reinforcements? The questions had not been worth asking then, they were not worth asking now. They had only one answer: We do what they ask us to do, and we don’t complain.
We don’t fight wars. This is a new age.
It seemed that to be a soldier now was a disgrace.
“Because you’re free you can be honest,”
“It has been a taste of freedom to know you,”
what she now, whatever his skill and tenderness, had to see was his job.
“If you know who your people are, you know who you are,” said Havzhiva’s father, Granite.
“Wealth can’t stop,” Granite said to Havzhiva. “It has to keep going. Like the blood circulating. You keep it, it gets stopped—that’s a heart attack. You die.”
Araha is enjoyment; honor; the particular quality of one’s gender, manhood or womanhood; generosity; the savor of good food or wine.
their people and their lineage did. They learned what people needed to learn, and lived their knowledge. “People have to learn to be human,” his father said.
There were things one could do and things one could not do; one did those things for people and people did those things for one.
Part of her tact as a teacher was knowing when a question needed an answer. She said nothing.
“There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal. There are two kinds of time, local and historical.”
‘To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.’ The Peoples are the rock. The historians are the river.”
answered: Because in what we do daily and in the way we do it, we enact the gods.
What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
Local knowledge is not partial knowledge, they said. There are different ways of knowing. Each has its own qualities, penalties, rewards. Historical knowledge and scientific knowledge are a way of knowing. Like local knowledge, they must be learned.
There’s more than one kind of knowledge, said the historians.
“You will think there are no rules,” she said. “There are always rules.”
Adult relationships are based on mutual freedom, mutual trust.
There was no going back and no going forward. So he must turn aside. Though he was one of them, he could no longer live with the People; though he had become one of them, he did not want to live with the historians. So he must go live among Aliens.
the right use of knowledge is fulfillment.
you don’t change a mind with a gun.
insuperably
“You can’t change anything from outside it. Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview, you see the pattern. What’s wrong, what’s missing. You want to fix it. But you can’t patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving.”
“No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.”
This Tualbeda, in Detake Province, don’t underestimate him, Yeron. His speeches are pure misogyny and anti-immigrant prejudice, and people are eating it up—”
My job was acceptance. To keep an acceptant spirit. That’s what I learned growing up. To accept. Not to change the world. Only to change the soul. So that it can be in the world. Be rightly in the world.”
What have we been doing here, all these years, but trying to find a good set of rules—a pattern that makes sense?”
can say only that it may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.
There was anger in me now. I had not felt anger while I lived at Zeskra. I could not. It would have eaten me. Here there was room for it, but I found no use for it. I lived with it in silence.
What I liked of myself was my hands, clever at their work, and my head, not clever at learning, but still learning, no matter how long it took.
In history I saw that any freedom has been made, not given.
They don’t need guns if they own our minds.”