Rahul Ahuja

“The West has been grinding Islam under its heel for a long time,” he said. “A civilization and a culture beaten into exhaustion, now past its prime and longing for a return to some nostalgic past looking nothing like the real one. Science, literacy, architecture, art, mathematics, tolerance—Islam once led the world in these things. That’s the real past. Not this paranoid, benighted plunge into dogma and ignorance and violence. All those fingers pointing back a thousand years—the Laughing Imam gave them all a nudge, from ignorance into enlightenment. Suddenly, the future wasn’t the false past. Wasn’t an endless succession of cultural, political, and economic defeat at the hands of the Infidel. No, now the future is going to be the rebirth of Islam’s Grand Age. Islam’s civilized glory. Faith not as a weapon, but as an anchor in the storm to come, in the storm now upon us.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“Law enforcement loses its moral compass when what is asked of it undermines its ethical base. When in service to corruption—and when that corruption is thoroughly even if only unconsciously perceived—despair and nihilism follows. The good is deemed ineffectual. The bad is set upon a movable scale of permissibility, one that inevitably climbs to ever greater extremes. In this context, the police become tribal and will act first and foremost in defense of itself. Further indoctrination reinforces this escalation. In effect, the law rises above the law, and the sudden absence of restraint is an invitation to unchecked brutality.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“Humanity’s crisis is, it seems, its inability to appreciate gifts freely given.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“Nothing ends. There is matter and there is energy, and some believe these two the only things in existence. But a third exists. It infuses both matter and energy, and yet also stands alone. Let us call it potential. Only in the realm of potential can we act, to effect changes upon all existence. Indeed, it is the realm in which we live, we living things, in our stubborn battle with success and failure.

Yet the truth remains. Of the two, success and failure, only one ends the game.

Now, poet, I see the shock writ deep upon your lined face, and yet it must be clear to you, even in this moment of despair, that love was at the heart of this tale, and now we must once more settle back and take breath, steadying ourselves for what is still to come.

The warriors wallow in what they will, in all that they make of the world, which is little more than destruction and suffering. Recall the child with the stone, on her knees in the grass, a boy’s crushed face beneath her? Such is the glory of the belligerent.

Revel in it, if you’re of the mind to.

What comes next, my friend, is entirely another kind of glory.

What is the secret of sorcery? It is potential. Now then, on the dawn of magic’s burgeoning, let us see what they make of it.”
― Steven Erikson, Fall of Light