Nick Irving > Recent Status Updates

Now there was only the sound of his life, building and building, soaring louder and louder until he could listen no more. His soul cried out for eternal silence.

He savored the newfound ecstasy of vengeance.

Look at this sunset, it’s beautiful, neh? This sunset exists. Tomorrow does not exist. There is only now. Please look. It is so beautiful and it will never happen ever again, never, not this sunset, never in all infinity. Lose yourself in it, make yourself one with nature and do not worry about karma, yours, mine, or that of the village.

A good solider has but one master, he thought. One real master.

“Nature is very strong with us.” Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. “Perhaps that is why we love life so much, Anjin-san. You see, we have to. Death is part of our air and sea and earth. You should know, Anjin-san, in this Land of Tears, death is our heritage.”

“There’s a smell of death over you and only I can protect you.”

“But understand clearly, all of you, that my death will not remove the cause of war nor will it prevent further conflict.”

It is so simple to catch a man, he told himself. All you need to know is the right bait.

“My Master says, in war and in peace, a good enemy can be more valuable than a good ally.”

Isn’t it only through laughter we can stay human?
. . .
All aboard waited to see what would be decided. They knew they were bottled tight. Ashore disaster, ahead disaster, to wait disaster. The net would come closer and closer and then they would be captured.

You’re a cruel, cold-gutted, heartless bastard but you’ve got majesty, no doubt about that.
. . .
His soul cried out for oblivion.

“We have a saying that time has no single measure, that time can be like frost or lightening or a tear or surge or storm or sunset, or even like a rock.”

“I was just wishing we were safe at sea, that’s all.”
“Is the sea ever safe?”
“Sometimes, senhora. Not often.”

“What will you do, priest, if when you’re dead you discover there is no God, that there’s no hell and your Eternal Salvation just a dream within a dream?”

“They use blood in their rituals, because blood is power, and the blood that has the most power is baby’s blood, a baby can that hasn’t been baptized; and they use more than the blood, they use the flesh too!”

The pain grew worse, grew so grinding that something shut down in Rosemary—some center of resistance and well-being—and she stopped reacting, stopped mentioning pain to Dr. Sapirstein, stopped referring to pain even in her thoughts. Until now it had been inside her; now she was inside it; pain was the weather around her, was time, was the entire world.

Now she was alive; was doing, was being, was at last herself and complete.

[The Pope’s] speech at the UN moved her, and she was sure it would help ease the a Vietnam situation. “War never again,” he said; wouldn’t his words give pause to even the most hardened statesman?

“That’s just what it is; show biz! The costumes, the rituals, every religion, not only Catholicism. Pageants for the ignorant.”

Perhaps there are things we don’t know yet — about magnetic fields or electrons or whatever — ways in which a place can quite literally be malign.

“I will not delay my death so that you can join me in it.”

Stomach churning. Heart hammering in my chest. Everything flashes of nightmares and blood and fear.
. . .
I allow myself to be drawn into the darkness.

I never said I had the right, Diago. Just the responsibility. We’re doing what has to be done to effect change. You can see that, surely.”

“What is it they say, again? What he needs of the many will always be loud. But in the end, it is only the strength of the few that matters.”

I wait until my stomach settles a little, then walk closer. I am here now. I may as well understand what in the gods-damned hell this horror actually means.

The Hierarchy is a monster that has to feed to survive. And inevitably, once it has eaten everything else, all that is left is to consume itself.
. . .
I’ve helped set off events that I have no control over anymore; I’m adrift on a river of violence, facing a broken dam that I can never build back. I barely notice the horror of the destruction this time. It’s a familiar backdrop, now.

“I do not know what shape the Republic will take when all of this is done, but it will need leaders made out of better stuff than our current ones.”

Fear is a lack of control, realized. Not the absence of control itself, but the understanding of it. The true, stomach-churning grasping of the fact that we have no significant way to affect what comes next in a given situation.

Fear is a lack of control, realized.

A spirit of gloom seemed to rise from the shadowed declivity, from the silence of the mournful wood and the damp darkness of the leaf-hidden earth.
. . .
I found myself in a loneliness indescribable and terrible.
. . .
Humanity was not so much absent as gone, and a feeling of doom and death was in the motionless air, which lay like a weight upon leaf and flower.