The Ancients Quotes

“He laid there sobbing to be a boy who so often had to die. ‘No,’ Maren told him. ‘You are a boy who gets to be reborn.”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“Just tell me, Ama. Here is what I need to know. How is bringing a baby into this now not the same as killing him?”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“Here was the lesson Cyrus would remember one day as governor of the revived theater: children, when left alone, will invent a comedy.”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“I’m not saying be passive or do nothing. I’m saying maybe we don’t have to wage war against every problem. Maybe we should be skeptical of what rich men call progress.”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“He would miss them. He would miss so much. He had never paid enough attention to the beauty that existed outside the archives, the poetry beyond the confines of language. If he could start his life over, he would live differently.”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“He began trying their language, caws from the back of his throat. At his sounds, they cocked their heads. Their responses sounded to his ear like snickers. He decided crows too must like to laugh.”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“Theirs would be a long journey, Auntie said, but the dead know patience.”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“If they were destined to meet, were they also destined to be drawn apart? If they were fated to begin, were they also fated to end?”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“Had you not come,’ Cyrus asked now in nearly a whisper, ‘do you think we would still be here now?’ It was a simple query. Had they not met that night in the theater, would they have met the next day on the street or the next year in the market—or would they still now be strangers? In other words, were they destined to come together or was this between them the result of random chance?”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“The history of civilization written in its weapons.”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“So many ancient stories told of fatherlessness. Mostly tales of revenge or hubris, sometimes both. To lose a father is to lose a king.”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“Not the shutters,’ the patriarch said. ‘Add a log. Dying is cold work.”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“these creatures who moved not unlike men—they oared on without a measure of respect for what was mightier than they were. This, the trait that forever separates animals from people: people know when to humble themselves and pray.”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“Because if a mother gave up, what hope was there for children?”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“He was gasping her name. Their lives together, their babies, their home—when he had reached for her this last time, she wasn’t there to hold him.”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“It wasn’t an elk she saw. It was a straight line. Black and thick, it came out of the mountain like giant trees felled and connected end to end. Half covered in dirt and half held aloft, disappearing and reappearing, part of the earth—but not. It was black but also brownish red, too high to climb over, at least two Leerits tall. This thing without words to hold it; this thing no story described, an impossible thing growing from the landscape. Was it alive?”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“They might be dead but Leerit was right—he could still feel them. Ama’s songs were always in his ear. Opi came to him in motion, in the way his feet moved about rocks, the way he’d hang an idle hand from his belt while looking in the distance.”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“Hear me. Hear what is true. Nothing wrong in this world is ever the fault of children.”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“The dead were given to the river, which returned them to the Sea, where storms lifted their spirits on winds and delivered them to mountains—this sacred perch upon which no living foot shall trespass.”
― John Larison, The Ancients

“Oh, my little girl. Hear me now. What’s wrong in this world is never the fault of children.”
― John Larison, The Ancients