Fastness Quotes

“Before you speak... I have already heard. Before you see... I had seen a million times. Before you reach... I came and departed, so is the way and life of a versatile soul.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“When the fuel is dried up in a vehicle, it stops driving automatically.
You are a vehicle in the spiritual and the physical world, so you need some oil for alacrity, in order to get to your destination.
The greater the quantity of your oil, the more you cover the distance, and the more you cover the distance, the closer you get to your success.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“When I was sixteen I read ten books a week: E.E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster--but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down.”
― Donald Hall, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

“At one end of the vast C bitten from the castle a sin­gle great bastion-tower stood, almost intact, five kilometres high, and casting a kilometre-wide shadow across the rum­pled ground in front of the convoy. The walls had tumbled down around the tower, vanishing completely on one side and leaving only a ridge of fractured material barely five hundred metres high on the other. The plant-mass babilia, unique to the fastness and ubiquitous within it, coated all but the smoothest of vertical surfaces with tumescent hanging forests of lime-green, royal blue and pale, rusty orange; only the heights of scarred wall closest to the more actively venting fissures and fumaroles remained untouched by the tenacious vegetation.”
― Iain M. Banks, Feersum Endjinn