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Awesome Quotes that are Awesome Dust of Dreams style... Rate Topic: -----

#61 User is offline   Seras 

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Posted 29 July 2010 - 01:43 AM

Found a few conversations I liked during my re-read of House of Chains, and a bit about Kallor in Toll the Hounds

"You're learning, friend"

"The lessons of civilization"

"Just so. There's little value in seeking to find reasons for why people do what they do, or feel the way they feel. Hatred is a most pernicious weed, finding root in any kind of soil. It feeds on itself"

"With words"

"Indeed, with words. Form an opinion, say it often enough and pretty soon everyone's saying it right back at you, and then it becomes a conviction, fed by unreasoning anger and defended with weapons of fear. At which point, words become useless and you're left with a fight to the death"



"Innocence is only a virtue, lass, when it is temporary. You must pass from it to look back and recognize it's unsullied purity. To remain innocent is to twist beneath invisible and unfathomable forces all your life, until one day you realize you no longer recognize yourself, and it comes to you that innocence was a curse that had stunted you, shackled you, defeated your every expression of living"


"But, Cotillion, it is knowledge that makes on aware of his or her own chains"


"Knowledge only makes the eyes see what was there all along, Apsalar. You are in possession of formidable skills. They gift you with power, a truth there is little point in denying. You cannot unmake yourself"


"But I can cease walking this singular path"


"You can, you can choose others, but even the privilege of choice was won by virtue of who you were-"

"What you were"

"Nor can that be changed. I walked in your bones, your flesh, Apsalar. The fisher-girl who became a woman - we stood in each other's shadow"



"He lived for such things. Sudden opportunities, unexpected powers stumbling, falling within reach. Anticipation awakened within him. Life thrust forth choices, and the measure of a man or woman's worth could be found in whether they possessed the courage, the brazen decisiveness, to grasp, hold, and not let go. Kallor never failed such moments. Let the curse flail him, strike him down; let defeat batter him again and again. He would just get back up, shake the dust off, and begin once more. He knew the world was damned. He knew that the curse haunting him was no different from history's own progression, the endless succession of failures, the puerile triumphs that had a way of falling over as soon as one stopped looking. Or caring. He knew life itself corrected gross imbalances by simply folding everything over and starting anew. Too often scholars and historians saw the principle of convergence with narrow, truncated focus. In terms of ascendants and gods and great powers. But Kallor understood that the vents they described and pored over after the fact were but concentrated expressions of something far vaster. Entire ages converged, in chaos and tumult, in the anarchy of Nature itself. And more often than not, very few comprehended the disaster erupting all around them. No, they simply went on day after day with their pathetic tasks, eyes to the ground, pretending everything was just fine. Nature wasn't interested in clutching their collars and giving them a rattling shake, forcing their eyes open. No, Nature just wiped them off the board. And truth be told, that was pretty much what they deserved. Not a stitch more. There were those, of course, who would view such an attitude aghast, and accuse Kallor of being a monster, devoid of compassion, a vision stained indelibly dark and all that rubbish. But they would be wrong. Compassion is not a replacement for stupidity. Tearful concern cannot stand in the stead of cold recognition. Sympathy does not cancel out the hard facts of brutal, unwavering, observation. It was too easy, too cheap, to fret and wring one's hands, moaning with heartfelt empathy - it was damned self-indulgent, in fact, providing the perfect excuse for doing precisely nothing while assuming a pious pose. Enough of that. Kallor had not time for such games. A nose in the air just made it easier to cut the throat beneath it. And when it came to that choice, why, he never hesitated. As sure as any force of Nature, was Kallor"

Fuck yea, Kallor FTW
Lives and loves, the gamut of existence was marked by such things. A breaking of paths, the ragged, uneven ever-forward stumble. Blood dried, eventually. Turned to dust. The corpses of kings were laid down and sealed in darkness and set away, to be forgotten. Graves were dug for fallen soldiers, vast pits like mouths in the earth, opened in hunger, and all the bodies were tumbled down, each exhaling a last gasp of lime dust. Survivors grieved, for a time, and looked upon empty rooms and empty beds, the scattering of possessions no-one possessed any longer, and wondered what was to come, what would be written anew on the wiped-clean slate. Wondering, how can I go on?
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#62 User is offline   Seras 

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Posted 14 August 2010 - 10:27 PM

"Even in this new world of yours, I am certain there is no shortage of followers, of those who are desperate to believe. And they will hunt down others and make of them victims. They will cut them and fill bowls with their innocent blood, in your name, Ganoes Paran, and so beseech your intercession, your adherence to whatever cause they righteously fashion"


"There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise of the excusative. One need not accept the responsibility of the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it. To strive for change, for true goodness in this portal world, one must acknowledge and accept, within one's own soul, that this mortal reality has purpose unto itself, that it's greatest value is not for us, but for our children and their children. To view life as but a quick passage along a foul, tortured path - made foul and tortured by our indifference - is to excuse all manner of misery and depravity, and to exact cruel punishment upon the innocent lives to come. I defy this notion of paradise beyond the gates of bone. If the soul truly survives the passage, then it behooves us - each of us, my friends - to nurture a faith in similitude: what awaits us is a reflection of what we leave behind, and in the squandering of our mortal existence, we surrender the opportunity to learn the ways of goodness, the practice of sympathy, empathy, compassion and healing - all passed by in our rush to arrive at a place of glory and beauty, a place we did not earn, and most certainly do not deserve"


"What is there left to understand? Choice is an illusion. Freedom is conceit. The hands that reach out to guide your every step, your every thought, come not from the gods, for they are no less deluded than we are - no my friends, those hands come to each of us...from each of us. You may believe that civilization deafens us with tens of thousands of voices, but listen well to that clamour, for with each renewed burst so disparate and myriad, an ancient force awakens, drawing each noise ever closer, until the chorus forms but two sides, each battling the other. The bloody lines are drawn, fought in the turning away of faces, in the stoppering of ears, the cold denial and all discourse, at the last, is revealed as futile and worthless. Will you yet hold, my friends, to the faith that change is within our grasp? That will and reason shall overcome the will of denial? There is nothing left to understand. This mad whirlpool holds us all in a grasp that cannot be broken; and you with your spears and battle-masks; you with the sardonic grin behind which screams fear and self-hatred; even you, who stands aside in silent witness to our catastrophe of dissolution, too numb to act - it is all one. You are all one. We are all one"



"It seemed so easy for many people to divide war from peace, to confine their definitions to the un-ambivalent. Marching soldiers, pitched battles and slaughter. Locked armouries, treaties, fetes and city gates opened wide. But Fiddler knew that suffering thrived in both realms of existence - he'd witnessed too many faces of the poor, ancient crones and babes in a mother's arms, figures lying motionless on the roadside or in the gutters of streets - where the sewage flowed unceasing like rivers gathering their spent souls. And he had come to a conviction, lodged like an iron nail in his heart, and with its burning, searing realization, he could not longer walk and see what he saw with a neatly partitioned mind, replete with its host of judgements - that critical act of moral relativity - this is less, that is more. The truth in his heart was this: he no longer believed in peace. It did not exist except as an ideal to which endless lofty words paid service, a litany offering up the delusion that the absence of overt violence was sufficient in itself, was proof that one was better than the other. There was no dichotomy between war and peace - no true opposition except in their particular expressions of a ubiquitous inequity. Suffering was all-pervasive. Children starved at the feet of wealthy lords no matter how secure and unchallenged their rule. There was too much compassion within him - he knew that, for he could feel the pain, the helplessness, the invitation to despair, and from that despair came the desire - the need - to disengage, to throw up his hands and simply walk away, turn his back on all that he saw, all that he knew. If he could do nothing then, dammit, he would see nothing. What other choice was there? And so we weep for the fallen. We weep for those yet to fall, and in war the screams are loud and harsh, and in peace the wail is so drawn-out we tell ourselves we hear nothing. And so this music is a lament, and I am doomed to hear it's bittersweet notes for a lifetime. Show me a god that does not demand mortal suffering. Show me a god that celebrates diversity, a celebration that embraces even no-believers and is not threatened by them. Show me a god who understands the meaning of peace in life, not in death"


"For the woman huddled on the floor beside the narrow bed, the world would have to wait a little longer. Arms closed about her drawn-up knees, head lowered, sheathed in black hair that hung in oily strands, she wept. And to weep was to be inside oneself, entirely, an inner place far more unrelenting and unforgiving than anything that could be found outside. She wept for the man she had abandoned, fleeing the pain she had seen in his eyes, as his love for her kept him stumbling in her wake, matching each footfall yet unable to come any closer. For that she could not allow. The intricate patters on a hooded snake held mesmerizing charms, but the bite was no less deadly for that. She was the same. There was nothing in her - nothing that she could see - worth the overwhelming gift of love. Nothing in her worthy of him. He had blinded himself to that truth, the flaw he had always possessed. A willingness, perhaps a need, to believe in the good, where no good could be found. Well this was a love she could not abide, and she would not take him down her path"



"There had been wild apes on Malaz Island once. He remembered, in Jakatakan, when he was maybe seven years old, seeing a cage in the market, the last island ape left, captured in the hardwood forests on the north coast. It had wandered down into a village, a young male seeking a mate - but there were no mates left. Half-starved and terrified, it had been cornered in a stable, clubbed unconscious, and now it crouched in a filthy bamboo cage at the dockside market in Jakatakan. The seven year old boy had stood before it, his eyes level with that black-furred, heavy-browed beast's own eyes, and there had been a moment, a single moment, when their gazes locked. A single moment that broke Bottle's heart. He'd seen misery, he'd seen awareness - the glint that knew itself, yet did not comprehend what it had done wrong, what had earned it the loss of freedom. It could not have known, of course, that it was now alone in this world. The last of it's kind. And that somehow, in some exclusively human way, that was it's crime. Just as the child could not have know that the ape too, had been aged seven. Yet both saw, both knew in their souls - those darkly flickering shapings, not yet solidly formed - that for this one time, they were each looking upon a brother"



"Who can say where divides truth and the host of desires that, together, give shape to memories? There are deep folds in every legend, and the visible outward pattern present a false unity of form and intention. We distort with deliberate purpose; we confine vast meaning into the strictures of imagined necessity. In this lies both failing and gift, for in the surrender we fashion, rightly or wrongly, universal significance. Specific gives way to general; detail gives way to grandiose form, and the in the telling, we are exalted beyond our mundane selves. We are, in truth, bound into greater humanity by this skein of words..."



"Denigration afflicted our vaunted ideals long ago, but such inflictions are difficult to measure, to rise up and point a finger to this place, this moment, and say: here, my friends, this was where our honour, our integrity died. The affliction was too insipid, too much a product of our surrendering mindful regard and diligence. The meanings of words lost their precision - and no-one bothered taking to task those who cynically abused those words to serve their own ambitions, their own evasion of personal responsibility. Lies went unchallenged, lawful pursuit became a sham, vulnerable to graft, and justice itself became a commodity, mutable in imbalance. Truth was lost, a chimera reshaped to match agenda, prejudices, thus consigning the entire political process to a mummer's charade of false indignation, hypocritical posturing and a pervasive contempt for the commonry. Once subsumed, ideals and the honour created by their avowal can never be regained, except, alas, by outright, unconstrained rejection, invariably instigated by the commonry, at the juncture of one particular moment, one single event, of such brazen injustice that revolution becomes the only reasonable response. Consider this then a warning. Liars will lie, and continue to do so, even beyond being caught out. They will like, and in time, such liars will convince themselves, will in all self-righteousness divest the liars of culpability. Until comes a time when a final lie is voiced, the one that can only be answered by range, by cold murder, and on that day, blood shall rain down every wall of this vaunted, weaning, society"



"Innocence is only a virtue, lass, when it is temporary. You must pass from it to look back and recognize it's unsullied purity. To remain innocent is to twist beneath invisible and unfathomable forces all your life, until one day you realize you no longer recognize yourself, and it comes to you that innocence was a curse that had stunted you, shackled you, defeated your every expression of living"

BUMP FOR GREAT JUSTICE
Lives and loves, the gamut of existence was marked by such things. A breaking of paths, the ragged, uneven ever-forward stumble. Blood dried, eventually. Turned to dust. The corpses of kings were laid down and sealed in darkness and set away, to be forgotten. Graves were dug for fallen soldiers, vast pits like mouths in the earth, opened in hunger, and all the bodies were tumbled down, each exhaling a last gasp of lime dust. Survivors grieved, for a time, and looked upon empty rooms and empty beds, the scattering of possessions no-one possessed any longer, and wondered what was to come, what would be written anew on the wiped-clean slate. Wondering, how can I go on?
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#63 User is offline   Hood's Smile 

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Posted 26 January 2011 - 02:13 PM

“Everything worth fighting for is gained without fighting. Every struggle is a struggle against doubt. Honour is not a thing to be chased, for it, as with all other forces of life, is impelled; streaking straight for you. The moment of collision is where the truth of you is revealed.”

The sort of quote you could include in a "10 thoughts to guide you through life" list. Brilliant.

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