Tress of the Emerald Sea

by Brandon Sanderson

If you wish to become a storyteller, here is a hint: sell your labor, but not your mind. Give me ten hours a day scrubbing a deck, and oh the stories I could imagine. Give me ten hours adding sums, and all you’ll have me imagining at the end is a warm bed and a thought-free evening.

drunk all the time.

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.

while we can often choose our actions, we rarely get to choose our consequences.

Signs of a mind stretching beyond its limit toward ideas just beyond its reach. This can happen to a dunce as easily as a genius; it’s no proof of capacity,

These were new emotions, and like new flavors, they could be simultaneously terrifying and intoxicating. What else would she have never known about herself, if she hadn’t left her home island? Worse, how many people like her lived in ignorance, lacking the experience to fully explore their own existence? 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.

the path to a life without empathy is a long and painful one, full of bartered humanity sold at a steep discount.

While a healthy measure of foolhardiness drove our ancestors toward discovery, fear kept them alive. If bravery is the wind that makes us soar like kites, fear is the string that keeps us

from going too far. We need it, but the thing is, our heritage taught us to fear some of the wrong things.

when one abandons certain fears and assumptions, an entire world opens up.

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

Painful or passionate, surreal or sublime, we cherish those little rocks of peak experience, polishing them with the ever-smoothing touch of recycled proxy living. In so doing—like pagans praying to a sculpted mud figure—we make of our memories the gods which judge our current lives.

we must take care not to let the bliss of the present fade when compared to supposedly better days. We’re happy, sure, but were we more happy then? If we let it, memory can make shadows of the now, as nothing can match the buttressed legends of our past.

Enjoy memories, yes, but don’t be a slave to who you wish you once had been.

the more she learned, the less afraid she had become. It is that way with most topics, as fear and knowledge often play on different sides of the net.

But for humans at large, knowledge usually equates to empathy, and empathy leads to understanding.