There is no path to the future, Fitz. The path is now. Now is all there is, or ever will be. You can change perhaps the next ten breaths in your life. But after that, random chance seizes you in its jaws again. A tree falls on you, a spider bites your ankle, and all your grand plans for winning a battle are for naught. Now is what we have Fitz, and now is where we act to stay alive.
In the dead of night I stirred. Wakefulness flowed back into me. I was a cup full of sorrow, but that sorrow was stilled, like a pain that abates as long as one does not move.
Vengeance took no account of innocence or right. It was the chain that bound horrific events together, that decreed that one awful act must beget another worse one that would lead to yet a third. It came to me, slowly, that this chain would never end.
Drink up your false courage and move forward. It’s the only direction a man can move in.
Sharpening your knife is never a waste of time.
When one has been disappointed for so long, hope becomes the enemy. One cannot be dashed to the earth unless one is lifted first, and I learned to avoid hope.
Doing something stupid and reckless is not a better proof of your love than doing something measured and powerful.
A manner of speaking becomes a manner of thinking.
Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.
Time is an unkind teacher, delivering lessons that we learn far too late for them to be useful.
We were one thing. A whole thing. You and I and Nighteyes. I felt a strange sort of peace. As if all the parts of me were finally in one place. All the missing bits that would make me a complete... thing.′ I shook my head. ‘Words don’t read that far.
He thought perhaps it was a woman’s way, to come out of such a storm of emotion and pain as if she were a ship emerging onto calm seas. She had seemed, not at peace, but emptied of sorrow. As if she had run out of that particular emotion and no other one arose to take its place.
Do not agonize about yesterday. Do not borrow tomorrow’s trouble. Let your heart hunt. Rest in the now.
Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back.
Once one knows what heartless people can do, it cannot be entirely forgotten. It always remains among the possible things that can befall you.
The problem is not that we forget the past. It is that we recall it too well. Children recall wrongs that enemies did to their grandfathers, and blame the granddaughters of the old enemies. Children are not born with memories of those who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn’t tell their children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better.
Strange, how being left out of a secret always feels like a betrayal of trust.
How strange to be loved simply for who I was.
If one bad thing befell me, I immediately linked it to every bad thing that had happened in the last week or might happen in the coming week. And when I became sad, I was prone to wallow in grief, piling up my woes and sprawling on them like a dragon on a hoard.
If all of her was not enough for him, then let him have none of her and seek what he needed elsewhere.