Reaper's Gale (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #7)

by Steven Erikson

our greatest enemies are those who are without certainty. The ones with questions, the ones who regard our tidy answers with unquenchable scepticism. Those questions assail us, undermine us. They…agitate. Understand, these dangerous citizens understand that nothing is simple; their stance is the very opposite of naivety. They are humbled by the ambivalence to which they are witness, and they defy our simple, comforting assertions of clarity, of a black and white world.

We always kill the good guys, don't we?

Inequity, else how can power be assessed, how can the gifts of privilege be valued? For there to be rich, there must be poor, and more of the latter than the former.

After all, tyranny has no sense of humour. Too thin-skinned, too thoroughly full of its own self-importance.

The affliction was too insipid, too much a product of our surrendering mindful regard and diligence. The meanings of words lost their precision – and no-one bothered taking to task those who cynically abused those words to serve their own ambitions, their own evasion of personal responsibility. Lies went unchallenged, lawful pursuit became a sham, vulnerable to graft, and justice itself became a commodity, mutable in imbalance. Truth was lost, a chimera reshaped to match agenda, prejudices, thus consigning the entire political process to a mummer’s charade of false indignation, hypocritical posturing and a pervasive contempt for the commonry.

Consider this then a warning. Liars will lie, and continue to do so, even beyond being caught out. They will lie, and in time, such liars will convince themselves, will in all self-righteousness divest the liars of culpability. Until comes a time when one final lie is voiced, the one that can only be answered by rage, by cold murder, and on that day, blood shall rain down every wall of this vaunted, weaning society.

‘Life stays stubborn until it has no choice but to give up, and even then it’s likely to spit one last time in the eye of whatever’s killed it.

look at yourself. Our souls might as well be trapped inside a haunted keep. Sure, we built it – each of us – with our own hands, but we’ve forgotten half the rooms, we get lost in the corridors. We stumble into rooms of raging heat, then stagger back, away, lest our own emotions roast us alive. Other places are cold as ice – as cold as this frozen land around us. Still others remain for ever dark – no lantern will work, every candle dies as if starved of air, and we grope around, collide with unseen furniture, with walls. We look out through the high windows, but distrust all that we see. We armour ourselves against unreal phantasms, yet shadows and whispers make us bleed.’

‘Having a reason to be miserable is always worse than having no reason but being miserable anyway.

Those without beauty compensated in other ways, the formal but artificial ways of rank and power, and that was just how things were the world over.

could be that’s all a soul really is: the bound, snarled mass of memories from one life.

He felt a chill whisper through him then, as if he’d stumbled onto something profound. About history. As it was remembered, as it was told and retold. As it was lost to lies when the truth proved too unpleasant.

At some point, no matter how repressive the regime, the citizenry will come to comprehend the vast power in their hands. The destitute, the Indebted, the beleaguered middle classes; in short, the myriad victims. Control was sleight of hand trickery, and against a hundred thousand defiant citizens, it stood no real chance. All at once, the game was up.

All real acts of chivalry are forms of repressed behaviour.’

This reminds me of all the "nice guys" out there

Make someone a martyr and surrender all control, of what that someone was in life, of what that someone becomes in death.

‘Never mind the truth. The past is what I say it is. That is the freedom of teaching the ignorant.’

Fill their heads with the noble glory of a non-existent past, then send them out with their eyes blazing in stupid – but comforting – fervour. And this will begin our new golden age, an exultation in the pleasures of repression and tyrannical control over the lives of everyone.

Make America Great Again!

Open to them your hand to the shore, watch them walk into the sea. Press upon them all they need, see them yearn for all they want.

I have seen the face of sorrow She looks away in the distance Across all these bridges From whence I came And those spans, trussed and arched Hold up our lives as we go back again To how we thought then To how we thought we thought then I have seen sorrow’s face, But she is ever turned away And her words leave me blind Her eyes make me mute I do not understand what she says to me I do not know if to obey Or attempt a flood of tears I have seen her face She does not speak She does not weep She does not know me For I am but a stone fitted in place On the bridge where she walks