You are frowning. Why?’ ‘Well, I’ve already killed a god today,’ Iron Bars said. ‘If I’d known this was going to be a day for killing gods, I might have paced myself better.
Why do the survivors remain anonymous – as if cursed – while the dead are revered? Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold?
Laws decide wich forms of oppression are allowed, Lord. And because of that, those laws are servants to those in power, for whom oppression is given as a right over those who have little or no power.
Diversity is worth celebrating, Humbrall Taur, for it is the birthplace of wisdom.
Those who knew but one path would come to worship it, even as it led to a cliff’s edge.
The gentler and kinder the god, the more harsh and cruel its worshippers, for they hold to their conviction with taut certainty, febrile in its extremity, and so cannot abide dissenters. They will kill, they will torture, in that god’s name. And see in themselves no conflict, no matter how bloodstained their hands.
Secrets have power so long as they remain secrets.
The closest held secret is the one that never sours with age.
Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.
We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawls on, ever on.
If we are to live,′ Rake went on, ’we must take risks. Else our lives become deaths in all but name. There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail – should we fall – we will know that we have lived.
Whatever evil you let ride becomes commonplace, eventually. Problem is, it’s easier to get used to it than carve it out.
That is all faith is, you know. Pity for our souls.
Tool interrupted, ’do you mock me, or your own ignorance? Not even the lichen of the tundra is at peace. All is struggle, all is war for dominance. Those who lose, vanish.
There was an old saying among the Perish that a room full of women was a knife-seller’s vision of paradise. ‘There will be betrayal.’ Oh yes indeed. Betrayal .
We should all live a life of hobbies. Doing only what gives us pleasure, only what rewards us in secret, private ways.
There’s little value in seeking to find reasons for why people do what they do, or feel the way they feel. Hatred is a most pernicious weed, finding root in any kind of soil. It feeds on itself.’ ‘With words.’ ‘Indeed, with words. Form an opinion, say it often enough and pretty soon everyone’s saying it right back at you, and then it becomes a conviction, fed by unreasoning anger and defended with weapons of fear. At which point, words become useless and you’re left with a fight to the death.
Justice without compassion was the destroyer of morality, a slayer blind to empathy.
The gods know, happiness is a precious and rare commodity, and indeed it seems that the more intelligent and perceptive the individual, the less happy they generally are. The cost of seeing things as they are, I expect.
Victory is an illusion. In all things.