He gave himself fully to the penitent life, fasting, praying, confessing his wickedness and execrating himself in public. He became a better man in the small matters of his days, an even better, wiser king in the great matters of state.
The common soldiers did not blame him for his excessive grief. They knew him. They knew his flaws. Indeed, I think they loved him all the more because he was flawed, as they were, and did not hide his passionate, blemished nature.
He said that the music – its order and precision – helped him find the patterns in things – the way through the confusion of events and opinions to direction, to order, and beyond, to inspiration.
It astonished me that Muslims, who put such store on emulation of their prophet, didn’t wish to emulate him in something so fundamental as fathering daughters. Muhammad.
Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ayn Rand.
The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There’s generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release.
I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it.
The wiles of a veteran turned the younger man’s own gift of speed against him.
But while I fill up my mouth with prayers, they bring no comfort. My words rattle against each other like the last beech leaves on a winter branch, and though a hard wind scours the forest, it cannot free them from the bough; it will not lift them upward into the wide white sky.
For if we could be allowed to see the Plague as a thing in Nature merely, we did not have to trouble about some grand celestial design that had to be completed before the disease would abate. We could simply work upon it as a farmer might toil to rid his field of unwanted tare, knowing that when we found the tools and the method and the resolve, we would free ourselves, no matter if we were a village full of sinners or a host of saints.
I ceased to serve a king and began, instead, to serve a kingdom.
But how would we repay the kindness of those who received us, if we carried the seeds of the Plague to them? What burden would we bear if, because of us, hundreds die who might have lived?
Only horses were honest, in the end.
I don’t rightly know who was my great-grandfather, much less his father. How come you know that about a horse?
Well, they say trauma etches the neurons, and I was traumatized by my appalling behavior.” Typical, Theo thought. He’d been accused, yet she was traumatized.
Why, I wondered, did we, all of us, both the rector in his pulpit and simple Lottie in her croft, seek to put the Plague in unseen hands? Why should this thing be either a test of faith sent by God, or the evil working of the Devil in the world? One of these beliefs we embraced, the other we scorned as superstition. But perhaps each was false, equally. Perhaps the Plague was neither of God nor the Devil, but simply a thing in Nature, as the stone on which we stub a toe.
I am not myself. As you know, better than anyone. You have seen how I am, these last months. I don’t know how to explain it, it is beyond any words that I have to describe. But it is as if there is a tempest in my mind, and I cannot see through the murk of it. I cannot think clearly – indeed, much of the time I cannot think at all. There is only a weight in my heart, a formless dread that shapes itself into pain. And then a greater dread of more pain.
Hard to say the right thing, these days.
Nothing illegal. Just the business itself – racing horses before they should even be ridden, wrecking their bones before they’ve finished growing.
But every time I had the opportunity, I lacked the will.
It wasn’t a good idea to speak without putting a deal of thought into it. Words could be snares. Less of them you laid out there, less likely they could trap you up.