Tress of the Emerald Sea

by Brandon Sanderson

“Him?” the rat said. “You left your home for a man?” Tress remained silent. “Hon, no man is worth getting killed over,” the rat said.

It might seem that the person who can feel for others is doomed in life. Isn’t one person’s pain enough? Why must a person like Tress feel for two, or more? Yet I’ve found that the people who are the happiest are the ones who learn best how to feel. It takes practice, you know. Effort. And those who (late in life) have been feeling for two, three, or a thousand different people…well, turns out they’ve had a leg up on everyone else all along. Empathy is an emotional loss leader. It pays for itself eventually.

Danger doesn’t make a thing less beautiful—in fact, there’s a magnifying influence. Like how a candle seems brightest on the darkest night. Deadly beauty is the starkest variety. And you will never find a murderess more intoxicating, more entrancing, than the sea.

One of the great tragedies of life is knowing how many people in the world are made to soar, paint, sing, or steer—except they never get the chance to find out.

Whenever one does discover a moment of joy, beauty enters the world.

Human beings, we can’t create energy; we can only harness it. We can’t create matter; we can only shape it. We can’t even create life; we can only nurture it. But we can create light. This is one of the ways. The effervescence of purpose discovered.

But people rarely watch you as much as you think; they’re too busy worrying whether you are watching them.

Do you know how many wars could have been prevented if just one person in charge had stopped to think, “You know, maybe we should double-check; perhaps blinking twice isn’t an insult in their culture”?

Do you know how many grand romances would have avoided tragedy if the hero had thought, “You know, maybe I should ask her if she likes me first”?

Do you know how many protracted adventures might have been shortened if the heroine had stopped to wonder, “You know, maybe I should look extra carefully to see if the thing I’m...

It makes you wonder who the true monster is: the killer, or the society that created them?”

“…You won’t throw me overboard or something?” “What?” she asked, horrified. “No! That would be awful!” “Tress, you make a terrible pirate.”

Or like how people ignore the existential horror that comes from knowing their body is slowly deteriorating every day, time itself marching them toward oblivion to the cadence of their beating hearts.

My mother always told me that the hardest part of any task is getting yourself to start it.”

Even small actions have consequences. And while we can often choose our actions, we rarely get to choose our consequences.

Worry has weight, and is an infinitely renewable resource. One might say worries are the only things you can make heavier simply by thinking about them.

“Most people never live, Tress, because they’re afraid of losing the years they have left…years that also will be spent not living. The irony of a cautious existence.”

People are like stomachs, you know. They can process some of what you feed them, but stuff in too much too fast, and eventually it’s going to come right back up.

It is one of the most bitter ironies I’ve ever had to accept: there are, unquestionably, musical geniuses of incomparable talent who died as street sweepers because they never had the chance to pick up an instrument.

Memory is often our only connection to who we used to be. Memories are fossils, the bones left by dead versions of ourselves.

Enjoy memories, yes, but don’t be a slave to who you wish you once had been. Those memories aren’t alive. You are.

It is a great irony that society tends to look down on those who sell their bodies, but not on those who lease out their minds.

But lies have a way of diluting a person. The longer you live them, the more you become a bucket of mixed paint, steadily veering toward generic brown.

Truth is, people are as fluid as time is. We adapt to our situation like water in a strangely shaped jug, though it might take us a little while to ooze into all the little nooks. Because we adapt, we sometimes don’t recognize how twisted, uncomfortable, or downright wrong the container is that we’ve been told to inhabit.

But after spending ages walking around with everyone piling bricks in your arms, it can throw you off balance when someone removes a brick to carry for you.

Sometimes the moments in our life pile up and become an unstoppable force that makes us change. But at other times they become a mountain impossible to surmount.

Everyone misses shots now and then. But if you become known as the person who misses—if you internalize it—well, suddenly every miss becomes another rock in that pile.

“It’s really not a problem that someone needs to be saved. Everyone needs help. It’s hard to be the person who makes trouble, but the thing is, everyone makes trouble. How would we help anyone if nobody ever needed help?”

“The part the stories leave out,” Tress said as the Sorceress’s runes formed into a vibrant wall, “is everything that comes before. You see, I’ve discovered that it’s all right to need help. So long as you’ve lived your life as the kind of person who deserves to be rescued.”