This, then, is friendship. A family you choose. What you give to it, you give freely. What you withhold from it, measures its depth.
Oh, we talk of progress, but what we really desire is the perpetuation of the present. With its seemingly endless excesses, its ravenous appetites. Ever the same rules, ever the same game.
Some roads, once set out upon, reveal no possible path but forward. Every other track is blocked by snarls of thorns, steaming fissures or rearing walls of stone. What waits at the far end of the forward path is unknown, and since knowledge itself may prove a curse, the best course is simply to place one foot in front of the other, and think not at all of fate or the cruel currents of destiny.
War is not a natural state. It is an imposition, and a damned unhealthy one. With its rules, we willingly yield our humanity.
Tattersail smiled. “The only death I fear is dying ignorant.
Fanaticism was so popular. There had to be a reason for that, didn’t there? Some vast reward to the end of thinking, some great bliss to the blessing of idiocy.
So you ain’t nearly as good as you think you are. What a shock. Look at your clothes and armour – you’re chopped to pieces, O mighty assassin.
The frog atop the stack of coins dares not jump.
Those whom the gods choose, ’tis said, they first separate from other mortals – by treachery, by stripping from you your spirit’s lifeblood. The gods will take all your loved ones, one by one, to their death. And, as you harden, as you become what they seek, the gods smile and nod. Each company you shun brings you closer to them. ‘Tis the shaping of a tool, son, the prod and pull, and the final succour they offer you is to end your loneliness – the very isolation they helped you create.
It’s the ignorant who find a cause and cling to it, for within that is the illusion of significance.
Play on, mortal. Every god falls at a mortal’s hands. Such is the only end to immortality.
He argued that every certainty is an empty throne. That those who knew but one path would come to worship it, even as it led to a cliff’s edge. He argued, and in the silence of that ghost’s indifference to his words he came to realize that he himself spoke – fierce with heat – from the foot of an empty throne.
Love changes, aye, in the manner of growing to encompass as much of its subject as possible. Virtues, flaws, limitations, everything – love will fondle them all, with child-like fascination.’ She.
All too often cowardice wears the habit of wounded pride.
No soul can withstand the sun’s bones of light and reason dims when darkness falls – so we shape barrows in the night for you and your kin.” “Forgive my interruption, then,” said I. “The dead never interrupt,” said the mason, “they but arrive.
Worry not. Sing your songs with all the earnestness you possess. What is talent but the tongue that never ceases its wag? Look upon us poets and see how we are as dogs in the sun, licking our own behinds with such tender love. Naught else afflicts us but the vapours of our own worries.
Where history means nothing. Lessons are forgotten. Memories – of humanity, of all that is humane – are lost.
A man does not marry a girl, nor a woman. He marries a promise, and it shines with a bright purity that is ageless. It shines, in other words, with the glory of lies. The deception is self inflicted. The promise was simple in its form, as befitted the thick-headedness of young men, and in its essence it offered the delusion that the present moment was eternal; that nothing would change; not the fires of desire, not the flesh itself, not the intense look in the eye.
The past is all patterns, and those patterns remain beneath our feet, even as the stars above reveal their own patterns – for the stars we gaze upon each night are naught but an illusion from the past.
Consider this a warning. Liars will lie, and continue to do so, even beyond being caught out. They will lie, and in time, such liars will convince themselves, will in all self-righteousness divest the liars of culpability.