There are no good men, Bleeder said. Choice is an illusion, lawman. There are those created to be selfish and there are those created to be selfless. This does not make them good or evil, any more than the ravaging lion is evil when compared to the placid rabbit.
I believed them. Scud, I believed Cuna was sincere. But could I trust my own assessment? The fact that I’d so grossly misread their expressions reinforced this idea. I was among aliens. They were people, with real love and emotions, but they also – by definition – wouldn’t do things the same way humans did.
I think I would feel more comfortable in this city,” she said, “if I didn’t know that our Mistborn had the volatile emotions of a teenage girl.
Funny, isn’t it, how so many of our stories start the same way, but have opposing endings? In half, the child ignores her parents, wanders out into the woods, and gets eaten. In the other half she discovers great wonders. There aren’t many stories about the kids who say, ‘Yes, I shall not go into the forest. I’m glad my parents explained that is where the monsters live.
The storm catches everyone, eventually. Does it matter?
Does the destination matter? Or is it the path we take?
I will not stop vibrating. The wind will not stop blowing. You will not stop drawing.
He holds the most frightening and terrible of all of the Shards. Ponder on that for a time, you old reptile, and tell me if your insistence on nonintervention holds firm. Because I assure you, Rayse will not be similarly inhibited.
If nobody asked questions, then we would never learn anything.
Course, that didn’t mean luck didn’t exist. You either believed in that, or you believed in what those Vorin priests were always saying – that poor people was chosen to be poor, on account of them being too dumb to ask the Almighty to make them born with heaps of spheres.
If that loss brings learning.
Sometimes we must fall, sometimes we will rise – some must be hurt while others have fortune, for that is the only way we can learn to rely on one another.
I had a splinter once,” Shallan noted. “It eventually got out of hand.
He felt an immediate spike of panic – which he shot in the head and dumped in a lake.
The haze cleared. My finger twitched, but I had not pulled the trigger. A figure stood from a crouch in the dust; he had fallen from above. He wore a black coat-thin, like a lab coat-dark trousers, black boots, and a pair of goggles over his eyes.
Elantris was the one place where she could remember feeling unconditional acceptance. She had not been a princess, she had been something far better – a member of a community where every individual was vital.
The human mind was very clever at tricking itself, at keeping the despair of inevitability at bay.
She looked up at me, and though there were tears in the corners of her eyes, she wasn’t weeping. She was laughing. “You,” she said, “are an utter fool, David Charleston. I wish you weren’t also so adorable.
Elend smiled, preparing his next argument. He could keep this discussion going for quite sometime. For, if there was one thing in particular that he had learned by growing up in his father’s house it was this: how to annoy people.
Ey,” Lift called to him. “You still creepy, old man?” “I am the man I was made to be,” he said back.