We are all worthwhile, sir, once we assume the burden of forgiveness and the effort of absolution.
The rush of the river was a voice, a presence. Water flowed indifferent to the heave and plunge of the sun, the shrouded moon and the slow spin of the stars. The sound reached them in a song without words, and all effort to grasp its meaning was hopeless, for, like the water itself, one could not grasp hold of sound. The flow was ceaseless and immeasurable and just as stillness did not in fact exist, so neither did true, absolute silence.
Keep repeating the exercise of grief and it loses meaning, it becomes rote, false, a game of self-delusion, self-indulgence. A way of never getting over anything, ever.
The notion of freedom could make even peace and order seem oppressive, generate the suspicion of some hidden purpose, some vast deceit, some unspecified crime being perpetrated beyond human ken. That was a generous way of looking at it; the alternative was to acknowledge that humans were intrinsically conflicted, cursed with acquisitive addictions of the spirit.
You weep for this, Trull Sengar, because your love has not been answered, and there is no greater anguish than that.
Was not love its own shock? A match to that of death? Did it not take the eyes first? Such reverberations as to weaken the bravest man or woman – its trembling echoes never left a mortal soul.
Proof that the freedoms once accorded non-Letherii peoples were born of both paternalism and a self-serving posturing as a benign overseer. What is given is taken away, just like that.
Do not seek to find hope among your leaders. They are the repositories of poison. Their interest in you extends only so far as their ability to control you. From you, they seek duty and obedience, and they will ply you with the language of stirring faith. They seek followers, and woe to those who question, or voice challenge. ‘Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper.
I am done with this world, for I am alone in it. Alone.
It was a conceit to imagine that they knew the world; that they knew its every detail. Forces ever worked unseen, in elusive patterns no mortal mind could comprehend.
The midday heat sapped her strength, and the sluggishness reached through to her thoughts.
People suffered, many died, but they struggled through and they survived.
In natural justice, Arathan, the weak cannot hide, unless we grant them the privilege. And understand, it is ever a privilege, for which the weak should be eternally grateful.
What frightened Paran most, these days, was that he had grown used to being used. He’d been someone else so many times that he saw a thousand faces, heard a thousand voices, all at war with his own.
There are many forms of courage, I believe, most of which pass unseen by the majority of us. It’s not always about facing death, is it? Sometimes it’s about facing life.
I would say, most of the time, yes. Fear that our opinions might be challenged. Fear that our way of seeing things might be called ignorant, self-serving, or indeed evil. Fear for our persons. Fear for our future, our fate. Our moment of death. Fear of failing in all that we set out to achieve. Fear of being forgotten.
Is possession a virtue? Is a lifetime of working for some rich toad a virtue? Is loyal employment in some merchant house a virtue? Loyal to what? To whom? Oh, have they paid for that loyalty with a hundred docks a week? Like any other commodity? But then, which version is truer – the virtue of self-serving acquisitiveness or the virtue of loyalty to one’s employer? Are.
Whoever waited outside was impatient – thunder rang imperiously through the room even as the old man reached for the bar.
To draw a weapon is to announce an end to uncertainty.
And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that – events beyond the will of the gods – and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility.