Deimilė > Recent Status Updates

"History drops from my fingers, spills from my lips like wine. Stories are like serpents, twisting in our hand - like songbirds, never returning once set free. I had long ago become a story, long ago ceased to be a man."

"There is no better ally than truth. The truth will get out. Crush it if you like, if you can... but the truth is a weed that grows when trampled on. It will grow to strangle you if you force it to."

"Beauty cannot stay, nor endure - indeed, that a thing is and is gone next is part of what makes a thing beautiful. The preciousness of any beautiful thing - any good thing - lies in its scarcity. And because all things are scarce when measured against eternity and infinity, all things are beautiful - if seen at the right angle, if captured in the right light."

"You chose. It is only that what you chose is impossible. Failure does not preclude free will."

Our fear of pain is the foundation of all morality.It is that fear that shapes our world, orders civilization. We pass laws, build walls and fortresses, fight wars and forge empires all to minimize our people's pain.Our experiences of pain teach us the nature of suffering, and so we are moved to minimize that suffering in others. Pain grounds our reality is the cornerstone of our interactions with the objective world

"Pain,. Shall I tell you what it's for? Pain teaches mercy,. You suffer so that you understand suffering, so that you do not inflict it without need. Pain makes us human, teaches us to be... human."

"Hardly five minutes of life, and the beast was begging for an end. Do we tolerate our suffering only because we come into ir gradually? Would we all reject life at our first taste of it, if we each but had the knowledge and faculties of age?"

"What is real? Only that which we believe to be real, or are made to believe, or can make others. What is a king but a man who asserts his belief in his own kingship on others? What is a kingdom but his dream? What you see is real, Marlowe, because I will make it real. Am making it real."

"Man is not matter, but a phenomenon, a wave crashing across the unpastured universe.
A force.
And that force was unchanged.
That force was me."

"I felt his love for the daughter he had not truly fathered, for the woman he had not truly wed. I watched as the Jaddian sorcerers handed him a girl child wrapped in a towel white as snow, heard his weeping, felt his joy and sorrow mingling as he held the babe in his arms. I felt his heart break as he faced his woman's killer, and knew it had been his love that wrenched the power from his broken spirit."

"He had suffered so much. Lost so much.
I saw battles, and battles. Death and death.
Pain. So much pain.
So much love."

"My rage was not blindness. Not then. It had not been blindness on Perfagium. On Perfagium, my fury had lent me clarity, a clearness of sight and a well dug deep by my grief. The scholiasts had banished emotion, or the great among them had. But in doing so they had banished the greater part of themselves."

"I would sooner relive every hour on the walls of the Dhar-lagon, every night in the pit, blood dripping from my ear, would sooner stomach the blood and screaming of the Prophet's coronation feast than endure that terrible silence.
And yet it is ever by my side.
I can hear it even now. It is with me always. If I but set down my pen and call her name she will never answer me.
Not ever again"

"I thought I would be ready, thought that after all these yeas and centuries, after so many false starts, that I could write of her. Of her end. I thought that now, perhaps, I could say something of that bleak silence, that total silence in the Ascalon then. But there is nothing. Nothing No words can enclose that silence, or capture the blackness on the holograph where she had been."

"Nothing endures, nor lasts forever. Not stone, not empires, not life itself. Even the stars will one day burn down. Even the darkness that comes after all will one day pass away to new light. The stones here on Colchis shall fall into the sea, and the sea dissolve to foam. The stars shall burn the worlds to ash, and cool themselves to cinders. All things fade. Fall. Shatter."

"A gulf had grown between me and the men and women in that bunker, a difference of category. They hardly seemed real, not men at all to me in that moment, but shades, shadows on the wall of the cave that was the world. Or it was as if they were all actors, holographs - and I alone was real. Still they moved, not realizing the light had gone out, not knowing the crowds were gone."

"An abyss vast and empty as all the plains of Eue howled dark through my soul. Bring her back... This time the words would not leave my throat. They have never left me. Lorian could not bring her back. Nothing could. All my denials could avail nothing. Change nothing.
Only the past is written.
Time runs down, and what once was never comes again.
Never, never, never, never.
Never."

"The boy I'd been was gone, replaced-renewed-by that thought and promise of a new tomorrow. A new future. A new life. Gone too was the woman I had met on Emesh, cold, cruel, and quick to judgment. Not her wounds-invisible to many, if not to me-but as I had grown beyond my frame, so had she, abandoning her demarchist prejudices, if not the iron in her spine and jaw. I loved her then, as well and truly as I ever had."

"Whole drafts I have written and abandoned - or burned - before this point. So much easier to begin again than go on. I have but to start over to have my people-my friends-alive again. Once more I find I wish to throw my work into the sea-so inadequate document it seems! So feeble and blinkered by my merely human hand and eye, so poor a testament to the people I have known. To my people."

"The world's changed. But men have not. Nor will. We keep making the same choices. The same mistakes. So the same wisdom will ever serve us."

"There is little right in the universe, and none which we do not fight for and make for ourselves."

"One cannot step in the same river twice, and home is not home when you return, for you are not yourself. The man you were yesterday died yesterday, and is only a piece of the man of today, as you will be tomorrow."

"But one cannot step into the same river twice, nor onto the same world. All things are always in motion. That is why it is the highest good and cause of civilization to preserve to conserve-what is good. It is for that reason we plant new seeds, that if we might not preserve the trees, we might preserve the forest. "

"The ugliness of the world does not fade, nor are fear and grief made less by time, nor is any suffering forgotten. We are only made stronger by its blows."

"Is it disrespectful to the House to love some Statues more than others? I sometimes ask Myself this question. It is my belief that the House itself loves and blesses equally everything that it has created. Should I try to do the same? Yet, at the same time, I can see that it is in the nature of men to prefer one thing to another, to find one thing more meaningful than another."

"A part of me will forever lie within that broken ring of green stone, amid the blood and sacrifice before the ruin of that dreaming god of night. But a part, too, rests now and always on a sunlit cliff above the waters of Colchis, under a sunlit sky. There is pain always, and ugliness, but the light and beauty of the world shine always above and beyond the powers of darkness to destroy."

"Now hear this. The old words seemed to drift back to me on the wind, carried by the ocean airs from world to world. Here's a lesson no tor or primate of the college will ever teach you, if it even can be taught. The world's soft the way the ocean is. Ask any sailor what I mean. But even when it is at its most violent, Hadrian... focus on the beauty of it."

"How could the Cielcin believe all creation a lie? Beauty is Truth, wrote Keats, and the world was beautiful."

"But you should not despise him for what he is. We are all shaped by our suffering. That we are only what we are is ever our chiefest sin. Pity him his trials, and have mercy. On him, and yourself."

"I loved my Empire not for what it was, but for what it should be, what it must be."