The most deadly seducers are the ones encouraging conformity. If you can only feel safe when everybody else feels, thinks and looks the same as you, then you’re a damned coward... not to mention a vicious tyrant in the making.
That’s a succinct summary of humankind, I’d say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words. Quote me, Duiker, and your work’s done.
For one who is poison, there is great pleasure in anguish. In wild longing. In the meaningless explorations of delighted surrender, subjugation – well, subjugation that was in truth domination – no point in being coy here. I surrender in order to demand. Relinquish in order to rule.
Lorn passed a hand over her eyes, then staggered back a step and reeled into the alley’s shadows behind her. She slid down one wall into a sagging crouch.
His brittle, yellowed bones were splintered, crushed and shattered.
Light exploded behind Felisin’s eyes as she sprawled sideways.
When we war against nature, we war against ourselves. There is no distinction, no dividing line, no enemy. We devour everything in a lust for self-destruction. As if that is intelligence’s only gift.
There are poets who glory in their recounts of battle, of all those struggles so deftly ritualized. And they tend lovingly their garden of words, heaping high the harvest of glory, duty, courage and honour. But each of those luscious, stirring words is plucked from the same vine, and alas, it is a poisonous one. Name it necessity, and look well upon its spun strands, its fibrous belligerence.
The tunnels shrieked with the wind, each one with its own febrile pitch, creating a fierce chorus.
As far as Gu’Rull could determine, the only virtue humans possessed was a talent for starting over, with stern resolve restored in the sudden glow of renewed optimism, in complete disregard of whatever lessons past failures might offer. And he had no choice but to acknowledge the power of that virtue. It is contingent upon collective amnesia, but as everyone knows, stupidity needs no excuse to repeat itself.
That’s the thing with Just Wars – they never end and never will because Justice is a weak god with too many names.
After all, war knows no other language. In war we invite our own destruction. In war we punish our children with a broken legacy of blood.
Speaking of which, what’s your take on abortion?’ ‘Do you eat eggs?’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘The unborn embryos of chickens, Samantha.
Precipitous creature,′ Kruppe muttered, reaching for the mug of wine the man had left behind. ‘Ah, look at this,’ he said, frowning up at Crokus, ‘nigh two-thirds full. A potential waste!’ Kruppe drank it down in one swift gulp, then sighed. ‘Said potential averted, Dessembrae be praised.
Out onto the battered road, then, the city falling away behind them. After a time, Karsa glanced back and bared his teeth at her. ‘Listen. That is better, yes?’ ‘I hear only the wind.’ ‘Better than ten thousand tireless contrivances.
In that moment, success or failure would lose all relevance. The triumph was in the stance. In the defiance. Because this is the essence of life itself. Human and wild, in that moment we are all the same.
There is nothing wrong with where we are, how we are. You spit on satisfaction, leaving you always unsettled and miserable. I am a Teblor – we live simply enough, and we see the cruelty of your so-called progress. Slaves, children in chains, a thousand lies to make one person better than the next, a thousand lies telling you this is how things should be, and there’s no stopping it.
Tradition was the last bastion of fools.
Laughing, he’d flung dense clouds of earth and stone skyward to blind them.
Skintick could not find himself in that future. He did not expect to complete this journey. He was not sure he even wanted to.