Christopher Ruocchio > Quotes

“My memory is to the world as a drawing is to the photograph. Imperfect. More perfect. We remember what we must, what we choose to, because it is more beautiful and real than the truth.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“Sad is like a big ocean, and you can’t breathe deep down. You can float on it, you can swim a little, but be careful. Grief is drowning. Grief is deep water.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Howling Dark

“It is a mistake to believe we must know a thing to be influenced by it. It is a mistake to believe the thing must even be real.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“The man who hopes for the future delays its arrival, and the man who dreads it summons it to his door.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“To love is in part the attempt to become a creature worthy of love.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Howling Dark

“Always forward, always down, and never left or right.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Howling Dark

“The fool believes the iniquities of the world are the fault of other men. Gibson’s voice, dry as old manuscript pages, had never been more clear. The truly wise try to change themselves, which is the more difficult and less grand task.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“But the ugliness of the world does not fade, and fear and grief are not made less by time. We are only made stronger. We can only float together on their tides, as otters do, hand in hand.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Howling Dark

“Atrocity is writ by quiet men in council chambers over crystal glasses of cool water. Strange little men with ashes in their hearts. Sans passion, sans hope… sans everything. Everything but fear.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“But the truth is poor poetry”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“Deep truths there may be, but none is deeper than this: Those lost to us do not return, nor the years turn back. Rather it is that we carry a piece of those lost to us within ourselves, or on our backs. Thus ghosts are real, and we never escape them.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Howling Dark

“Augustine once said that if there are such things as the past and the future, they do not exist as such but are only the present in their own times. The past, he says, exists only in memory and the future only in expectation. Neither is real.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“I told you once that the universe has no center, and thus every point is its center, and it is so. If I have strained you, reader, by my repeated insistence that every action matters, that every moment of every life is the moment, the axis about which all things turn, understand that I say these things because they are true. Every step, every turn, every refusal to step. Everything matters. The cosmos is not cold or indifferent because we are not indifferent, and we are a part of that cosmos, of that grand order which has dropped from the hand of He who created it. Every decision creates its ripples, every moment burns its mark on time, every action leads us ever nearer to that last day, that final last battle and the answer to that last question: Darkness? Or light?”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Ashes of Man

“A single death, wrote one ancient king, is a tragedy, but a genocide can only be understood through statistics.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“We live in stories, and in stories, we are subject to phenomena beyond the mechanisms of space and time. Fear and love, death and wrath and wisdom, these are as much part of our universe as light and gravity.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“The world’s soft the way the ocean is. Ask any sailor what I mean. But even when it is at its most violent, Hadrian . . . focus on the beauty of it. The ugliness of the world will come at you from all sides. There’s no avoiding it. All the schooling in the universe won’t stop that.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“Dangerous things, names. A kind of curse, defining us that we might live up to them, or giving us something to run away from.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“You cannot lead as a tyrant. The people under you will not let you. To lead is a kind of service, a duty you owe to those who follow.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Demon in White

“Funny thing about lessons: the idiot student thinks when he is given a little fact that he owns it—that two and two is always four no matter the circumstance. Just as it was not true for Orwell, it is not true for anyone. True lessons require not only knowing, but that the student practices his knowledge again and again. Thus knowledge becomes us, and we become more than the animal and the machine. That is why the best teachers are students always, and the best students are never fully educated. I had forgotten Gibson’s lesson for a moment, but stood a little straighter, shouldering as a pack my grief, my regret and self-loathing.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Howling Dark

“One cannot step in the same river twice, and home is not home when you return, for you are not yourself. The man you were yesterday died yesterday, and is only a piece of the man of today, as you will be tomorrow.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Ashes of Man

“The greater part of wisdom is in silence.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Demon in White

“I do not consider myself a great artist, though she made me wish I was. I could not have known at this first meeting how many times I would fail to capture her, in charcoal and in life. The brazen declaration of her; the pride in that upturned chin, the pointed nose, and the tidy carelessness that put her above the opinions of lesser men. There's little sign of her wit-so close to cruelty-in any of the drawings I made of her, and this poor prose cannot contain her beauty, body or soul. They are only echoes, as is this.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“We are beasts of burden, Hadrian, we men. We struggle, and by that struggle are filled, and so define ourselves. That is the way.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Howling Dark

“Knowledge is the mother of fools,” he said. “Remember, the greatest part of wisdom is in recognizing your own ignorance.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“Sift the sand of every world and sort the dust of space between them, and you will find not one atom of fear, nor gram of love nor dram of hatred. Yet they are there, unseen and uncertain as the smallest quanta and just as real.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“But then, so few of us truly think themselves evil. They simply think good and evil matters of opinion, and seek to impose their opinion—which is evil—on good. Nothing is evil in its beginning, it only grows that way.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Demon in White

“Civilization is a kind of prayer: that by right action we might bring to pass the peace and quiet that is the ardent desire of every decent heart.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“Always accuse the enemy of what you’re doing.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Kingdoms of Death

“As the ancient sea was cruel, so too is that blacker sea, vaster by far, that fills the void between the suns like water.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“But there are women and women, commander. Some ask nothing of us, and so we are nothing to them. But there are those women who ask all of us. Those are the ones worth giving all for.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Ashes of Man