The Second Apocalypse

"Of course we make crutches of one another. Why else would we crawl when we lose our lovers?"

"History. Logic. Arithmetic. These all should be taught by slaves."

"Every woman knows there are only two kinds of men: those who feel and those who pretend. Always remember, my dear, though only the former can be loved, only the latter can be trusted. It is passion that blackens eyes, not calculation."

"It is far better to outwit Truth than to apprehend it."

"That hope is little more than the premonition of regret. This is the first lesson of history."

"To merely recall the Apocalypse is to have survived it. This is what makes The Sagas, for all their cramped beauty, so monstrous. Despite their protestations, the poets who authored them do not tremble, even less do they grieve. They celebrate."

"In the skins of elk I pass over grasses. Rain falls, and I cleanse my face in the sky. I hear the Horse Prayers spoken, but my lips are far away. I slip down weed and still twig—into their palms I pool. Then I am called out and am among them. In sorrow, I rejoice. Pale endless life. This, I call my own."

"Souls can no more see the origins of their thought than they can see the backs of their heads or the insides of their entrails. And since souls cannot differentiate what they cannot see, there is a peculiar sense in which the soul cannot self-differentiate. So it is always, in a peculiar sense, the same time when they think, the same place where they think, and the same individual who does the thinking. Like tipping a spiral on its side until only a circle can be seen, the passage of moments always remains now, the carnival of spaces always sojourns here, and the succession of people always becomes me. The truth is, if the soul could apprehend itself the way it apprehended the world—if it could apprehend its origins—it would see that there is no now, there is no here, and there is no me. In other words, it would realize that just as there is no circle, there is no soul."

"You are fallen from Him like sparks from the flame. A dark wind blows, and you are soon to flicker out."

"Of all the Cants, none better illustrates the nature of the soul than the Cants of Compulsion. According to Zarathinius, the fact that those compelled unerringly think themselves free shows that Volition is one more thing moved in the soul, and not the mover we take it to be. While few dispute this, the absurdities that follow escape comprehension altogether"

"As a miller once told me, when the gears to not meet, they become as teeth. So it is with men and their machinations."

"Death, in the strict sense, cannot be defined, for whatever predicate we, the living, attribute to it necessarily belongs to Life. This means that Death, as a category, behaves in a manner indistinguishable from the Infinite, and from God."

"One cannot assume the truth of what one declares without presuming the falsity of all incongruous declarations. Since all men assume the truth of their declarations, this presumption becomes at best ironic and at worst outrageous. Given the infinity of possible claims, who could be so vain as to think their dismal claims true? The tragedy, of course, is that we cannot but make declarations. So it seems we must speak as Gods to converse as Men."

"What frightens me when I travel is not that so many men possess customs and creeds so different from my own. Nay, what frightens me is that they think them as natural and as obvious as I think my own."

"A return to a place never seen. Always is it thus, when we understand what we cannot speak."

"Some say I learned dread knowledge that night. But of this, as with so many other matters, I cannot write for fear of summary execution."

"Truth and hope are like travelers in contrary directions. They meet but once in any man’s life."

"If war does not kill the woman in us, it kills the man."

"Like so many who undertake arduous journeys, I left a country of wise men and came back to a nation of fools. Ignorance, like time, brooks no return."

"Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion. Verily, it is conviction that kills"

"Faith, they say, is simply hope confused for knowledge. Why believe when hope alone is enough?"

"Ajencis, in the end, argued that ignorance was the only absolute. According to Parcis, he would tell his students that he knew only that he knew more than when he was an infant. This comparative assertion was the only nail, he would say, to which one could tie the carpenter-string of knowledge. This has come down to us as the famed “Ajencian Nail,” and it is the only thing that prevented the Great Kyranean from falling into the tail-chasing scepticism of Nirsolfa, or the embarrassing dogmatism of well-nigh every philosopher and theologian who ever dared scratch ink across parchment. But even this metaphor, “nail,” is faulty, a result of what happens when we confuse our notation with what is noted. Like the numeral “zero” used by the Nilnameshi mathematicians to work such wonders, ignorance is the occluded frame of all discourse, the unseen circumference of our every contention. Men are forever looking for the one point, the singular fulcrum they can use to dislodge all competing claims. Ignorance does not give us this. What it provides, rather, is the possibility of comparison, the assurance that not all claims are equal. And this, Ajencis would argue, is all that we need. For so long as we admit our ignorance, we can hope to improve our claims, and so long as we can improve our claims, we can aspire to the Truth, even if only in rank approximation. And this is why I mourn my love of the Great Kyranean. For despite the pull of his wisdom, there are many things of which I am absolutely certain, things that feed the hate which drives this very quill."

"But who are you, man, to answer God thus? Will what is made say to him who made it—Why have you made me this way? Does the potter not have power over his clay, to make, from the same mass, one vessel for honour, and another for dishonour?"

"When a man possesses the innocence of a child, we call him a fool. When a child possesses the cunning of a man, we call him an abomination. As with love, knowledge has its season."

"upon the high wall the husbands slept, while ’round the hearth their women wept, and fugitives murmured tales of woe, of greater cities lost to Mog-Pharau …"

"We burn like over-fat candles, our centres gouged, our edges curling in, our wick forever outrunning our wax. We resemble what we are: Men who never sleep."

"On my knees, I offer you that which flies in me. My face to earth, I shout your glory to the heavens. In so surrendering do I conquer. In so yielding do I seize."

"For He sees gold in the wretched and excrement in the exalted. Nay, the world is not equal in the eyes of the God."

"Where luck is the twist of events relative to mortal hope, White-Luck is the twist of events relative to divine desire. To worship it is to simply will what happens as it happens."

"Ask the dead and they will tell you. All roads are not equal. Verily, even maps can sin."

"What the world merely kills, Men murder."

"… conquered peoples live and die with the knowledge that survival does not suffer honour. They have chosen shame over the pyre, the slow flame for the quick."

"The will to conceal and the will to deceive are one and the same. Verily, a secret is naught but a deception that goes unspoken. A lie that only the Gods can hear."

"A beggar’s mistake harms no one but the beggar. A king’s mistake, however, harms everyone but the king. Too often, the measure of power lies not in the number who obey your will, but in the number who suffer your stupidity."

"Look unto other and ponder the sin and folly you find there. For their sin is your sin, and their folly is your folly. Seek ye the true reflecting pool? Look to the stranger you despites, not the friend you love."

"Since all men count themselves righteous, and since no righteous man raises his hand against the innocent, a man need only strike another to make him evil."

"Where two reasons may deliver truth, a thousand lead to certain delusion. The more steps you take, the more likely you will wander astray."

"Little snake, what poison in your bite! Little snake, what fear you should strike! But they don’t know, little snake—oh no! They can’t see the tiny places you go…"

"Damnation follows not from the bare utterance of sorcery, for nothing is bare in this world. No act is so wicked, no abomination is so obscene, as to lie beyond the salvation of my Name."

"The world is only as deep as we can see. This is why fools think themselves profound. This is why terror is the passion of revelation."

"If the immutable appears recast, then you yourself have been transformed."

"A soul too far wandered from the sun, walking deeper ways, into regions beneath map and nation, breathing air drawn for the dead, talking of lamentation."

"The heavens, the sun, the whole of nature is a corpse. Nature is given over to the spiritual, and indeed to spiritual subjectivity, thus the course of nature is everywhere broken in upon by miracles."

"Without rules, madness. Without discipline, death."

"We belittle what we cannot bear. We make figments out of fundamentals, all in the name of preserving our own peculiar fancies. The best way to secure one’s own deception is to accuse others of deceit."

"It is not so much the wisdom of the wise that saves us from the foolishness of the fools as it is the latter’s inability to agree."

"The bondage we are born into is the bondage we cannot see. Verily, freedom is little more than the ignorance of tyranny. Live long enough, and you will see: Men resent not the whip so much as the hand that wields it."

"All ropes come up short if pulled long enough. All futures end in tragedy."

"And they forged counterfeits from our frame, creatures vile and obscene, who hungered only for violent congress. These beasts they loosed upon the land, where they multiplied, no matter how fierce the Ishroi who hunted them. And soon Men clamoured at our gates, begging sanctuary, for they could not contend with the creatures. “They wear your face,” the penitents cried. “This calamity is your issue.” But we were wroth, and turned them away, saying, “These are not our Sons. And you are not our Brothers.”"

"As death is the sum of all harms, so is murder the sum of all sins."