Dour music has its own beauty, for the song of ruin is most fertile.
In natural justice, Arathan, the weak cannot hide, unless we grant them the privilege. And understand, it is ever a privilege, for wich the weak should be eternally grateful. At any given moment, should the strong will it, they can swing a sword and end the life of the weak. And that will be today’s lesson. Forbearance.
Stone, sea, forest, city – and every creature that ever lived – all share the same struggle. Being resists unbeing. Order wars against the chaos of dissolution, of disorder.
Accord dissolves but blame is impossible to assign, leading to malaise, confusion and a vacuous resentment.
Generally speaking, people useless at everything else become academics.
Because they imply a unity that does not exist. Only rarely does a life have a theme, and even then such themes exist in confusion and uncertainty, and are only described by others once that life has come to an end. A tale is the binding of themes to a past, because no tale can be told as it is happening.
I am not empty inside. I am not at peace.’ The word seemed to startle him. ‘Peace? I spoke not of peace. In absence, Korya, there is yearning.’ His strange eyes focused on her. ‘Do you not so yearn?
I will answer in kind. No act is final. Another inevitably awaits.
A soldier knows but one truth, and that truth is, without faith, you are already as good as dead. Faith in the soldier at your side. But even more important – and no matter how delusional it is in truth – there is the faith that you cannot be killed. Those two and those two alone – they are the legs holding up every army.
The two men, Tiste and Azathanai, had begun forging something between them, and whatever it was, it was unafraid of truths.
A man pushed from behind by many hands will go in but one direction, no matter what he wills.
The failing was that it was so easily won, and therefore became a thing of little worth for the recipient. Could no one see the hurt she felt, each and every time she was cast aside, sorely used, battered by rejection? Did they think she welcomed such feelings, the crushing despond of seeing the paucity of her worth?
But even that word, ‘stranger’, arose from a time of kin-hearths and a half-dozen huts marking the very limits of a people, a realm, a temporary nest in the seasonal rounds – when we lived in nature and nature lived in us and no other divide existed beyond what was known and what was unknown.
Every worthwhile plan is diabolical.
Hands were such extraordinary tools, she mused. Tools, weapons, clumsy and deft, numb and tactile. Among tribal hunters, they could speak, a flurry of gestures eloquent in silence. But they could not taste. Could not hear. Could not weep. For all that, they killed so easily.
Peace reigned in silence, inside and out, in isolation and exhaustion.
Isolation hones the inner voice, the unspoken dialogue between the selves.
Gifts are rarely appreciated,′ Arathan said, and in his mind he was remembering his first night with Feren. ‘And the one who receives knows only confusion. At first. And then hunger... for more. And in that hunger, there is expectation, and so the gift ceases being a gift, and becomes payment, and to give itself becomes a privilege and to receive it a right. By this all sentiment sours.
Where flies Korabas, there shall be T’iam.
Duty and courage had been made animate, and this was all the T’lan Imass were, and had been for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet, without choice, such virtues as duty and courage were transformed into empty, worthless words. Without mortality, hovering like an unseen sword overhead, meaning was without relevance, no matter the nature – or even the motivation behind – an act. Any act.