Hunter Groce

“I knew the sorts of men who wrote these dispatches, the logothetes of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment. Cheap men, brassy little cynics defined by their dislike of their fellow man. The practiced ear could hear the calculation behind every word like fishhooks in the mind. We have all been those men, but most of us have the decency not to make a career of it.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The poets speak of rage as a fiery thing, consuming, destroying, twisting a soul to mistaken action. They sing songs of revenge, of lovers killed in the night, of passions inflamed, of houses torn asunder. But there is little heat in rage. The scholiasts have it right. Rage is blindness. A red color blurring out the world. It is light, not fire. And light, when finely tuned can cut as surely as steel.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“It's not the nature of life to be otherwise. Life, when it knows that it must cease living, will always rebel. It cannot help itself...... You were afraid to die; the life that was in you, that composes you, that is greater than you, did not want to die. You have talked of the instinct of immortality. I talk of the instinct of life, which is to live, and which, when death looms near and large, maters the instinct, so called, of immortality. It mastered in you (you cannot deny it), because a crazy Cockney cook sharpened a knife.”
― Jack London, The Sea Wolf