Cage of Souls Quotes

“It is easy for a comfortable, free man to cry at the fall of every little bird. A prisoner in fear of his life has precious little regret to spare for anyone else.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“For that, I thank him. A vast and worthless education is the greatest gift a child can have.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“Shadrapar has no purpose, no function. It exists for itself only, its own downward spiral to oblivion. It exists only to imprison the minds of those who dwell within it, so that their world shrinks until it holds nothing but their own desires, and they fight to stop you showing what’s beyond the bars. So I called it the cage of souls, so they would understand.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“One of the Academy Masters once said that nobody ever made a statue of a man running away. My answer to that is that very few living men get statues.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“We must be careful what we become when we seek to change things. An old principle of physics: if you push, you yourself are pushed in turn.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“Lawful authority was all, and moral authority merely its shadow, to be forced into whatever shape the law adopted.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“We know the drudgery of being surrounded by all that unceasing banality.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“It is a great lie of civilisation that the things we invest with our emotions are real and important, but they are not. Take away the people and they vanish into smoke. All those idle dreams: government, money, education, love, revenge. All these things are parasites that cannot survive without the host.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“The haven of the dispossessed, the lower frontier of human knowledge, had been swept away at the cost of countless lives for the sake of some rich man's lie”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“life is made of patterns that repeat themselves,”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“Sitting in that cell with him as he wheezed his last hours away, I could feel my presence eroding, the desert wind smoothing over all the footprints I had ever made.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“I was also unsure that once a man has raised the mob (for there is really only one mob, waiting in potentia to be raised) whether anyone can keep it from the barbaric acts of violence it strains for.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“Like many clownish”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“I’m supposed to eat a dead animal?” I demanded. In Shadrapar we ate what we grew in the ground. Raising animals for food was a disgusting process abandoned in ancient times. The idea of consuming the flesh of another creature was vile and turned my stomach.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“A prisoner in fear of his life has precious little regret to spare for anyone else.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“For the stars are very far away, and however fast our machines carried us, it was not fast enough. The gaps between stars are so great that nothing can cross them quickly, not even light, which is fastest of all. We never found a way to skip between the stars, to meet the people we were sure awaited us there. That broke the back of our optimism. The spirit of man was crushed by the distances between the stars.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“When even the lowliest guard has full power of life or death over you, you find that higher grades of authority lose their sting.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“I could not imagine it, but that silence was shouting at us, telling us in no uncertain terms that we had not come home after all. Home was a place we would never know again; all there was of Shadrapar was what we carried with us. The cage of souls was empty, and all the souls had flown free”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“blind and deaf by its own hand, ruthless to those who tell it the truth.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“the book fell like a stone into the utter silence of people just not caring.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“you set out to change things, the things you want to change push back.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“everyone told stories of the past and reinvented history to suit them.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“faith feeds on persecution.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“Living in a cage teaches you helplessness.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“Even the simplest plans go wrong, especially when put together by the simplest people.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“When surrounded by ignorance, the educated man can get away with anything.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“War,” said Sergei, “is just capitalism by other means.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“It turned out that the entire enterprise was what we students used to call “a skive”.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“The sheer abundance of vitality on all sides oppressed me as the prisoners Below had, a physical weight on the mind. Everywhere I looked there was riotous, fecund life. Insects tore through the air on clattering wings and consumed one another voraciously. The trees were hung with climbing lizards, red-shot serpents, long-limbed verminous things, webs the size of double doors. The water around us was in constant turmoil as things alighted on the surface and were snatched from below. Beyond all this there were the calls of all the things we could not see, a thousand beasts marking their territory, pleading for mates or triumphing over prey. And it stank. It stank of rot and rebirth enough to make me gag. The world was alive. I”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls

“faith feeds on persecution. If you try to stop someone doing something, even for a perfectly obvious reason, they will assume there is some great secret you are trying to keep from them.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls