The Second Apocalypse

"The world has its own ways, sockets so deep that not even the Gods can dislodge them. No urn is so cracked as Fate."

"Everything is concealed always. Nothing is more trite than a mask."

"If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise. When it comes to Men and their myriad, mercenary natures, revelation always comes in twos."

"... and they scoff at heroes, saying that Fate serves disaster to many, and feasts to few. They claim that willing is but a form of blindness, and conceit of beggars who think they wrest alms from the jaws of lions. The Whore alone, they say, decides who is brave and who is rash, who will be hero and who will be fool. And so they dwell in a world of victims."

"Ever do Men use secrets to sort and measure those they love, which is why they are less honest with their brothers and more guarded with their friends."

"Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy."

"The shape of virtue is inked in obscenity."

"There is morality and there is cowardice. The two are not to be confused, even though in appearance and effect they are so often the same."

"If the Gods did not pretend to be human, Men would recoil from them as spiders."

"This one thing every tyrant will tell you: nothing saves more lives than murder."

"No two prophets agree. So to spare our prophets their feelings, we call the future a whore."

"Skies are upended, poured as milk into the tar of night. Cities become pits of fire. The last of the wicked stand with the last of the righteous, lamenting the same woe. One Hundred and Forty-Four Thousand, they shall be called, for this is their tally, the very number of doom."

"Know what your slaves believe, and you will always be their master."

"Gods are epochal beings, not quite alive. Since the Now eludes them, they are forever divided. Sometimes nothing blinds souls more profoundly than the apprehension of the Whole. Men need recall this when they pray."

"The truth of all polity lies in the ruins of previous ages, for there we see the ultimate sum of avarice and ambition. Seek ye to rule for but a day, because little more shall be afforded you. As the Siqû are fond of saying, Cû’jara Cinmoi is dead."

"Any fool can see the limits of seeing, but not even the wisest know the limits of knowing. Thus is ignorance rendered invisible, and are all Men made fools."

"In life, your soul is but the extension of your body, which reaches inward until it finds its centre in spirit. In death, your body is but the extension of your soul, which reaches outward until it finds it circumference in flesh. In both instances, all things appear the same. Thus are the dead and the living confused."

"Yet the soul lingers like a second smell. A sailor wrecked at sea, it clings. Lest it sink and drown in Hell."

"The heroes among us, they are the true slaves. Thrust against the limits of mortality, they alone feel the bite of their shackles. So they rage. So they fight. We only have as much freedom as we have slack in our chains. Only those who dare nothing are truly free."

"The world is a big place and our brain is only three pounds."

"I wanted a literate, socially intricate, and cosmopolitan world - something I could have fun destroying."