Florian Armas > Quotes

“Politician? Me? Do I look like a big mouth with large pockets?”
― Florian Armas, Io Deceneus: Journal of a Time Traveler

“It’s the end of the day, but it feels like dawn, and a new beginning. It comes to me that both twilight periods are, in fact, symmetrical events on opposite sides of midnight, a cycle of endless creation and destruction, an Ouroboros.”
― Florian Armas, The Shamans at the End of Time

“When the fight ends you can afford to relax. That’s the worst part. Winner or loser you have again eyes to see around you. Blood, butchered bodies, bodies pierced by arrows. You stir inside, your heart tightens, the feeling of loss wells up. The sense of smell is the next thing to revive, adding a new dimension of pain. I closed the eyes of the last cadet, blue eyes, unseeing, his body, so small, almost a child, the youngest cadets were all gone, their faces surprised in death. Cold lips never able again to kiss a girl. It’s then that the emptiness swallows you and you mourn inside. Damn you, Scharon. No! Damn you, Travellers.”
― Florian Armas, Io Deceneus: Journal of a Time Traveler

“Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, full of unknowns, asking questions but raising possibilities.”
― Florian Armas, Io Deceneus: Journal of a Time Traveler

“Knowledge: knowledge can be dangerous, dangerous for you or for others interacting with you, therefore again dangerous for you. Always treat it with respect.”
― Florian Armas, Io Deceneus: Journal of a Time Traveler

“The war had started a long time ago, before their great-grandfathers were born, and there were many stories about why and who had started it; the truth becoming lies, then truth again, then lies again; history twisted like a snake, changing on the whims of each new ruler.”
― Florian Armas, The Game and the Board

“They have cast my life like dice, in a game that is not a game. The unusual erupted into my life like a storm; I mean unusual in my actual perception of things. Do not mistake me; I never desired things that are certainly harder to bear, and nobody asked me if I really wanted an extraordinary life. That is not entirely true; I was asked, in the way a child seeing a cake is asked if he really wants to eat it.”
― Florian Armas, Io Deceneus: Journal of a Time Traveler

“When technology dictates every move, the most dangerous weapon is independent thought.”
― Florian Armas, The Other Side

“It was the mist which made everything strange, spread across the land, a seven-foot-thick blanket, stretched almost uniformly over the flat bottom of the valley, and the gentle slopes leading down into it. As silent as the mist, Codrin’s army moved out of the forest. An observer high above the ground would see rows of floating heads, arranged in a matrix, the distance between them almost regular. Having helmets of many different colors, the heads offered a striking contrast to the white-gray monotony of the mist. An army of floating heads. Unaware of their weird appearance from above, the heads continued their journey down, toward Lenard’s army.
To an observer on the ground, nothing could be seen until it was too late. Lenard’s sleeping soldiers woke up when the ground trembled to the rhythm of more than a thousand horses trampling everything in their way. They woke up, and they died. Some of them died while they slept. When the last cry died away, and the fog finally lifted, the surviving men surrendered. At the end of the clash, which became known as the Battle of the Mist, Codrin found that he had lost only fifteen men. Lenard had lost half of his army, his son and his life.”
― Florian Armas, Respectant

“Life is like a math equation,” he used to say. “It’s up to you to find the most beautiful solution.”
― Florian Armas, The Shamans at the End of Time

“Life is like a math equation,” he used to say. “It’s up to you to find the most elegant solution.”
― Florian Armas, The Shamans at the End of Time

“as if hypnotized by a goddess – or by Kaa, the python from The Jungle Book, which feels both absurd and terrifying.”
― Florian Armas, The Shamans at the End of Time

“The soldier fell as if he were asleep.
In deadly silence, you see blood. Dark red as spilled wine, it spreads on the rocks. It spreads on a yellow flower. It spreads.”
― Florian Armas, Errant

“Darkness teaches what daylight hides.”
― Florian Armas, The Other Side