Derek > Recent Status Updates

"They show me by their very wariness what a prize it is simply to open my eyes and behold."

"Joy was more than just an absence of discomfort."

"He wished he could give her the world, but he had no world to give."

"We can be strong in the face of kings and priests...but to live is to have worries and uncertainties."

"Truth can never be defeated...Even if people do forget about it occasionally."

"Convert or die—both options were sickening, but conversion was obviously the more logical choice. However, a quiet voice inside her argued that it was worth dying, if death would prove that truth was more powerful than physical strength."

"Besides, it was beneficial to have a reputation for honesty, if only so that one could lie at crucial moments."

"And all the while the man could not accept what his own eyes had seen. Nor fathom what his own heart had intended. Nor undo what his own hand had done. He was as one who wakes from a dream too late and sees that the sun has already set and the day is gone."

"The Elantrians represented the ultimate flaw of human arrogance. They had set themselves up as gods. Their hubris had earned them their fate. In another situation, Hrathen would have been content in leaving them to their punishment. However, he happened to need them. Hrathen turned to Dilaf. "The first step in taking control of a nation, Arteth, is the simplest. You find someone to hate."

"One person can begin. 'And can begin better with the help of others.' "

"for soon enough, we'll all be
sleeping together, beyond
all things that ever mattered."

"I envy them for all they haven't seen,
and maybe with enough time I might too
cease to see these things I tell you of,
that drape upon my soul like heavy shackles"

"remove our comforts, and we become animals."

"You can't keep digging up the corpse of who you used to be"

"What's any of this for, if people can't change?"

"Each new resort to violence enlarges the argument against our species, and the task of hope becomes harder."

"Good intentions had to be coupled with a realistic look at the effects of your actions. It was entirely too easy to make things worse while trying to make them better."

"But the longer they'd interacted, the more each side had recognized the ordinary nature of the other. Myths became men. And every society knew how to kill other men."

"Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery."

"the point is that not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafe, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it."

"Governments need a separation of powers, legislative checks and balances, and laws legislated as if the party or person we fear the most will acquire the power to wield them."

"Men rarely see their own actions as unjustified."

"They embodied everything crude and despicable that our parents had hoped to leave behind, a long with their childhood pennilessness, in the Third Ward slums, and yet here were our demons got up as our guardians, each with a loaded revolver strapped to his calf..."

"I cannot accept that the religious intolerance emanating from the White House has already so corrupted the ordinary citizen that he has lost all respect for fellow Americans of a creed or faith different from his own."

"For every high-profile would-be 'Christian' leader who has led all-too-willing followers into a battle based on lies, arrogance, greed and the lust for power, there are (thank God) countless unsung heroines and heroes who have heeded the words of Jesus about those who want to be leaders needing to be the servant of all."

"They live in a dream, we live in a nightmare."

"Of all human experiences, death is the most humbling. To be so finally and completely stripped of our ability, to be so tangibly reminded that we are nothing "but dust." No other experience can do for us what death does. I wonder sometimes if this is why we must die. Why the punishment for our pride is final and total humility. Why the cure for our pride is final and total humility."

Perhaps the final and fullest expression of human pride is complete and utter hopelessness, a view of the world that has so dismissed God that nothing matters anymore. Because pride leads us to reject God, we end up trusting ourselves. But..when the brokenness of the world presses in, when we feel the weight of our own helplessness, we succumb to listlessness and despondency. Nothing has purpose. Nothing has meaning.

"America wasn't a fascist country and wasn't going to be...There was a new president and a new Congress but each was bound to follow the law as set down in the Constitution.They were Republican, they were isolationist, and among them, yes, there were anti-Semites—as indeed there were among the southerners in FDR's own party—but that was a long way from their being Nazis."