The Sword of Cyrus Quotes

“Deuteronomy this time. “Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the LORD will personally go ahead of you. He will be with you; he will neither fail you nor abandon you.”
― JC Ryan, The Sword of Cyrus

“No weapon that is formed against you will prosper. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their vindication is from Me’ declares the Lord.”
― JC Ryan, The Sword of Cyrus

“To remember someone who had disappeared from your life, and never be able to find out what had happened to them. Come to think of it, that did happen to most people. And when the memory resurfaced, it was more painful or less painful, depending on how close to the other you’d been. More often than not, it was just a brief episode of melancholy. People you were close to didn’t vanish like that, most often. They were still traveling your same timeline. It would bear some thought to discover who pulled whom with them.”
― JC Ryan, The Sword of Cyrus

“It’s more like, like plasma,” he said, struggling to explain to the laypeople around him. “It flows, all right, but not linearly. Certain events create the potential for alternate timelines, and even those can rejoin themselves at some later date. We travel along, and our decisions dictate which timeline we follow. People who are closely linked by physical or emotional ties are swept in the same direction as each other, and if someone follows a different timeline, his memory disappears, usually, from the collective knowledge of the others.”
― JC Ryan, The Sword of Cyrus

“I’ve often wondered if time is real. The physicists are beginning to dispute that, you know. They view what we experience as time more as us traveling along a continuum that exists all at once, like we’re on a conveyor belt, being carried past all these events that are static. They’ve always existed, it’s only us happening upon them that make us experience time.”
― JC Ryan, The Sword of Cyrus

“The practice of muta’a, or temporary marriage for pleasure in return for money or other gain, was allowed by Mohammed, and the higher purpose, to restore the Persian Empire, served as the required necessity. The secrets uncovered would be the payment. Thus assured, the women entered training in the arts of seduction willingly.”
― JC Ryan, The Sword of Cyrus

“No one noticed the subsidence of the river, and the gates were left open to allow the citizens to cross at will. By morning, the city had fallen without a fight. “The mighty men of Babylon have forborne to fight, they have remained in their holds: their might hath failed; they became as women…. One post shall run to meet another, and one messenger to meet another, to show the king of Babylon that his city is taken at one end.”
― JC Ryan, The Sword of Cyrus

“Jeremiah’s prophecy had predicted what would happen. “Thus saith the Lord to…Cyrus…I will…open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut.” So had the prophets prophesied, and so it came to pass. The enormous gates that barred entrance from the riverbed to the streets that crossed the river were carelessly left open. While the Babylonians feasted and drank, once again fulfilling prophecy, Cyrus and his invaders casually walked into the city without challenge. “I will make drunk her princes, and her wise men, and her captains, and her rulers, and her mighty men, and they shall sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake, saith the King, whose name is the Lord of hosts.”
― JC Ryan, The Sword of Cyrus

“None of Cyrus’s soldiers knew of the holy book of the Hebrews, where prophecy regarding their leader spoke of the favor of their one god, known to the Hebrews as YHVH, toward Cyrus. Perhaps Cyrus himself was unaware of it, but he was about to fulfill the prophecy in Isaiah and again in Jeremiah of the holy book, made 90 years before his birth. “I will dry up thy rivers…I will dry up her sea.” Babylon’s vulnerability was the Euphrates River, where it entered and exited below the transverse walls that bridged it. Cyrus diverted the river upstream, forming a lake and causing the river to become shallow enough for his men to wade, passing under the walls into the center of the city.”
― JC Ryan, The Sword of Cyrus