Hunter Groce

“Funny thing about lessons: the idiot student thinks when he is given a little fact that he owns it-that two and two is always four no matter the circumstance. Just as it was not true for Orwell, It is not true for anyone. True lessons require not only knowing, but that the students practices his knowledge again and again. Thus knowledge becomes us, and we become more than the animal and the machine. That is why the best teachers are students always, and the best students are never fully educated.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Howling Dark

“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