Ishmael

“We’re all good men until we’re pushed to the edge. Then you either die a good man, or the good man in you dies.”
― Zamil Akhtar, Gunmetal Gods

“She made a fool of me.”
“And who’s not a fool? Who gets from the birthing chair to the grave
with dignity? What prize do the gods hand out to people who never let
themselves care about anything enough to be disappointed by the loss?
Look around you, Captain. Everyone who laughs at you or cringes away?
They’re all thinking of some time when it was them. Some race they ran
and came in last, someone they wooed who didn’t want them, some
moment of glory they reached for and wound up with an empty hand for the
trouble. We’re all fools. Everyone. That’s why we hate fools so much.
They’re the echoes of when we were vulnerable in front of the world
ourselves, and that’s hard for us to forgive.”
― Daniel Abraham, Blade of Dream

“Life is a puzzle with no answer; a game with no rules; a maze with no exit, except death. And still we stumble on through the dark, creating form where there is none, seeing patterns that are not there.”
― Antonia Hodgson, The Raven Scholar

“The potential benefits of an efficient marriage in most cases cannot be achieved without sacrifices, as the spouses do not have identical preferences. So marriage requires honest, hard-to-fake signals of commitment. These are provided in many societies by costly conditions for marriage, for example, the obligation for brides to leave their kin groups, for grooms to provide bride wealth, to show adequate means to support a family, and the like.56 Making commitment public makes it stronger, because it makes defection more costly to one’s reputation. Victoria cannot desert Albert and Albert cannot neglect Victoria without their breaking their word and revealing themselves as unreliable individuals, therefore unfit for cooperation in the eyes of third parties.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create