the-broken-empire

Brother Row you could trust to make a long shot with a short bow. You could trust him to come out of a knife fight with somebody else's blood on his shirt. You could trust him to lie, to cheat, to steal, and to watch your back. You couldn't trust his eyes though. He had kind eyes, and you couldn't trust them.

It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.

War, my friends, is a thing of beauty.

We can__ be trapped by fear. Lives lived within such walls are just slower deaths.

We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across the surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man__ control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.

Nothing can be cut away. Even the worst of our memories is part of the foundation that keeps us in the world.

Perhaps I just wanted to know what it was that I wanted. Maybe that is all that growing up means.

As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.

When you've committed yourself to violence it takes an almost inhuman effort to stop short. It's one of those things that once you've started need to be finished, rather like coitus, interrupting that's a sin, even the priests say so.

Dark times call for dark choices. Choose me.

It__ the silence that scares me. It__ the blank page on which I can write my own fears.

Sometimes I wished I could cut away old memories and let the wind take them. If a sharp knife could pare away the weakness of those days, I would slice until nothing but the hard lessons remained.