This is the secret that none dares tell who fights for a cause. Dying, we are all alike.
Pain redeems all. It is the awareness of life, a reminder of death.
Pain obliterates everything else. In pain, there is only the eternal present.
Are you a minor character in my tale, or am I a lesser figure in yours?
There is as much deception in noise as there is in silence.
Love is hard, harder than steel and thrice as cruel. It is inexorable as the tides, and life and death alike follow in its wake.
And Kushiel sends no punishment that we are not fit to bear.
It is a comfort, in anguish, to be reminded of the scale of one’s own troubles against the mighty breadth of the world.
And having once chosen, never to seek to return to the crossroads of that decision-for even if one chooses wrongly, the choice cannot be unmade.
There is no folly like the folly of the wise.
Clearly, Im drawn to characters with inner conflicts.
The tapestry of history is woven of many threads.
Genius requires an audience.
It’s funny, because in deference to conventional wisdom, I spent my struggling writer years trying to suppress my naturally baroque literary voice and write clean, spare prose. I finally gave up and embraced my baroque tendencies when I wrote the Kushiel series.
Fear and lies fester in darkness. The truth may wound, but it cuts clean.
True friendship must be akin to romance, I think. only without all the anguish and anxiety.
The harp sounds at each passing breeze, but that does not mean the tune is masterfully played.
There are patterns which emerge in one’s life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation on a theme. So musicians say the greatest sonatas are composed; whether or not it is true, I do not know, but of a surety I have seen it emerge in the tapestry of my life.
I preferred a hard truth to a well-meant lie.
We may not have demon fathers dangling offers of infernal power before us, but everyone understands what it means to struggle with temptation or resist the urge to give in to our baser natures.