In general it’s a good idea to avoid people who take themselves too seriously. As individuals, we have only so much seriousness to go round, and people who take themselves very seriously don’t have enough seriousness left over to take other people seriously. Instead they tend to look down on them, and are secretly pleased when they get stuff wrong, because they just prove to the too-serious types that they were right not to take them too seriously to begin with.
Instead, there was only the kind of silence that comes when someone takes away a clock to be repaired and after a time you become aware of its absence because its gentle, reassuring tick is gone and you miss it so.
The four ages of man, as far as Williamson was concerned, were confusion, anger, complacency, and grumpiness, but it was important to embrace them in the right order. The.
Good will attract good to itself, and those involved will unite toward a common goal. Evil, in turn, draws evil men, but they will never truly act as one. They will always be distrustful, always jealous. Ultimately, they seek power for themselves alone, and for that reason they will always fall apart at the end.
The law doesn’t require truth, only the appearance of it. Most cases simply rest on a version of it that’s acceptable to both sides. You want to know the only truth is? Everybody lies. – Elwin Stark.
A book is a carrier, and the ideas contained within its covers are an infection waiting to be spread. They breed in men. They adapt according to the host. Books alter men, and men, in their turn, alter worlds.
Books are constantly changing the world. If you’re a Christian, you have been changed by the Bible, by the word of God, or what was left of it when it was finally wrung through the hands of men. If you are a Muslim, look to the Koran; if a Communist, to Marx and Engels. Don’t you see? This world is constantly being altered by books.
You cannot perform acts of evil in the name of a greater good, because the good suffers. It is corrupted by what has been done in its name.
Then again, maybe nostalgia was an understandable response to a world that appeared to be going all to hell, as long as everyone remembered that the past was a nice place to visit but nobody should want to settle in it. One.
But no one on either side ever forgot that the law was white. Justice might be blind, but the law wasn’t. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelt of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law.
They were called “rooms,” but it was still a cell. A room you could leave when you chose to do so; a cell you could not.
War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity. There were wars before it, and there will be wars after it, and in between people will still fight one another and hurt one another and maim one another and betray one another, because that is what they have always done.
It didn’t help when he told David that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldn’t see her. An unseen mother couldn’t go for long walks with you on summer evenings, drawing the names of trees and flowers from her seemingly infinite knowledge of nature; or help you with your homework, the familiar scent of her in your nostrils as she leaned in to correct a misspelling or puzzle over the meaning of an unfamiliar poem; or read with you on cold Sunday afternoons when the fire.
I made you do nothing, Jonathan,” replied the Crooked Man. “You did it because you wanted to. No one can make you do evil. You had evil inside you, and you indulged it. Men will always indulge it.
It never paid to underestimate children.
Not every wound needs to be poked and opened, and not every wrong needs to be reexamined, or dragged kicking and screaming into the light. Better just to let the wound heal, even if it doesn’t heal quite right, or to leave the wrongs in the dark, and remind yourself not to go stepping into the shadows if you can avoid it.
These were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside.
There’s always someplace to go, even if it’s only someplace else.
That was what death was like: trapped in a small space with a big weight holding you down for all eternity.
If he has a weakness, it’s that he’s a moral being. Where possible, he’ll do the right thing, the just thing, and if he does wrong he’ll bear the guilt of it.