This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all. People die. Old orders pass. New societies are born. When we say “the world has ended,” it’s usually a lie, because the planet is just fine. But this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. For the last time.
You pretended to hate him because you were a coward. But you eventually loved him, and he is a part of you now, because you have since grown brave.
Fear of a bully, fear of a volcano; the power within you does not distinguish. It does not recognize degree.
Who is to say plutonium is more powerful than, say, rice? One takes away a million lives, the other saves a hundred times as many.
The body fades. A leader who would last relies on more.
All that stuff about Father Earth, it’s just stories to explain what’s wrong with the world. Like those weird cults that crop up from time to time. I heard of one that asks an old man in the sky to keep them alive every time they go to sleep. People need to believe there’s more to the world than there is.
But human beings, too, are ephemeral things in the planetary scale. The number of things that they do not notice are literally astronomical.
There are many of us now. Enough to be called a people in ourselves and not merely a mistake.
Father Earth thinks in ages, but he never, ever sleeps. Nor does he forget.
People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.
Given a choice between death and the barest possibility of acceptance, they were desperate, and we used that. We made them desperate.
This is a terrible thing that she is saying. It is a terrible thing that she loves herself.
The opposite of liking is not disliking, after all. The opposite of liking is apathy.
But it is one thing to resolve to die, quite another to actually carry out that resolve in the midst of dying.
Wounds get better. What makes grief get better?” “Nothing. Time can ease it, but nothing ends it.
The look on her face is one of horror, or perhaps sorrow so great that it might as well be horror. Past a certain point, it’s all the same thing.
All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” – T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph.
Urgency and despair don’t get along well.
Fear was like poison to mortals; it killed their rationality.
Then she wonders why a part of her is trying to find value in degradation.