A little truth seasons a lie like salt.
After you, it’s all cheap tequila.
We speak of stories ending, when in truth it is we who end. The stories go on and on.
What’s the point of being a grown-up if you can’t indulge the kid inside you every now and then?
Even a stunted tree reaches for sunlight.
But slight mistakes accumulate, and grow to gross errors if unchecked.
It’s the same questions we ask of our existence, and the answer is always the same. The mystery lies not in the question nor the answer, but in the asking and answering themselves, over and over again, and the end is engendered in the beginning.
It is passing strange, what a fluid thing is one’s own identity.
You sang the seas calm, and you drove the Dalriada to war, whatever it took. They know that. That’s why they adore you. But everyone needs to laugh in the face of death. They’re following an anguissette into battle. Give them credit for seeing the absurdity of it. You’ve been dwelling on it long enough.
As often as not, we forge our own chains. And from those, not even Adonai Himself can free us. We must do it ourselves.
They are fools, who reckon Elua a soft god, fit only for the worship of starry-eyed lovers. Let the warriors clamor after gods of blood and thunder; love is hard, harder than steel and thrice as cruel. It is as inexorable as the tides, and life and death alike follow in it’s wake.
There are others. There will be others. Other heroes, other heroines. Other prophecies to fulfill, other adversaries to despise. There will be stories told and forgotten, and reinvented anew until one day, perhaps, the oldest are remembered, and the beginning may end, and the ending begin.
In the general course of things, when beauty passes, the flower bows its head upon the stem and fails. Sometimes, though, when the petals droop, a framework of tempered steel is revealed within.
No two sacrifices are the same, and yet all are, in the end. It is the commitment to belong, wholly, to that which claims one.
Genius requires an audience. For all his cleverness, Delaunay was an artist and as vulnerable as any of his kind to the desire to vaunt his brilliance. And there were few, very few, people capable of appreciating his art. I did not know, then, how deep-laid a game they played with each other, nor what part in it I was to play. All I knew was that she was the audience he chose.
But to force growth is to kill it.
I never forgot, never, that it had been he who, with two words, turned my deadliest flaw to a treasure beyond price.
The wise man,” the dragon rumbled, “does not play games with dragons.
If the greatest danger one faces as a slave is displeasing one’s masters, this is the second: pleasing them.
Years ago, I had a teacher who taught me that all ways lead to the Way,” I said slowly, thinking. “That there is a great truth behind all the truths of the world, and the faces of the gods are masks that may be changed at will.