City of Miracles

My definition of an adult is someone who lives their life aware they are sharing the world with others. My definition of an adult is someone who knows the world was here before they showed up and that it'll be here well after they walk away from it. My definition of an adult, in other words, is someone who lives their life with a little fucking perspective.

What a tremendous sin impatience is, he thinks. It blinds us to the moment before us, and it is only when that moment has passed that we look back and see it was full of treasures.

If one were to protest all the injustices of life,” says Sigrud, “great and small, one would have no time for living.

But freedom and human happiness has a direct relationship to the number of people who have power over their own world, their own lives. Far too many people still have no say in how they live. The more power is dispersed, the more that will change.

It is a fool who lives his life believing the waves upon which he sails shall remember him. The seas know nothing. This makes them beautiful. And this makes them terrible. —DREYLING PROVERB, ORIGIN

And then he understands: it’s a loop, an endless loop of injured children, growing old but keeping their pain fresh and new, causing yet more injury and starting the whole cycle over again.

Just once, he thinks, I would like to think of a solution that does not involve me nearly blowing myself up.

In my operational days, there were three ways of thinking about things. There were things you knew. Then there were things you knew you didn’t know. And then there were the things you didn’t know that you didn’t know.” “No wonder we keep having so many international crises,” she says, “if you lot are running around talking like that.

Change is a slow flower to bloom. Most of us will not see its full radiance. We plant it not for ourselves, but for future generations. But it is worth tending to. Oh, it is so terribly worth tending to.

One should not seek ugliness in this world. There is no lack of it. You will find it soon enough, or it will find you.” Taty

You asked me if I wanted to forget. The answer’s no. I want to keep it. Even if it hurts.

xxx it feels to me that...that death is but a thunderstorm. Just wind and noise. You can't ask meaning of such a thing. Not even of your own.

All political careers end in failure. Some careers are long, some are short. Some politicians fail gracefully, and peacefully—others, less so. But beloved or hated, powerful or weak, right or wrong, effective or irrelevant—eventually, eventually, all political careers end in failure.

It's unfair that the dead leave us," she says. "But it's worse that they never really go away.

It’s a loop, an endless loop of injured children, growing old but keeping their pain fresh and new, causing yet more injury and starting the whole cycle over again.

What a tremendous sin impatience is

But that day is tomorrow. And right now, today, there is at least a hot cup of tea.

All things are subservient to time.

A better world comes not in a flood, but with a steady drip, drip, drip.

People don’t change. Nations don’t change. They get changed. Reluctantly. And not without a fight.

There’s a clunk from down the porch. Sigrud can’t lift his head to see, but Restroyka sits up, alarmed. “Dear, I thought I told you to go back in and stay in the house!” “You also told me to fetch another cord of wood,” says a voice, low and sullen. “Those are two contradictory orders, Auntie.” Sigrud frowns. Auntie? “I don’t like you being out of the house,” says Restroyka. “If someone skulking around in the trees out there took some potshot at you and got lucky, I’d never forgive myself!” “Unless the sheep have rebelled and taken up sharpshooting, I suspect we’re quite safe here.

If men can do anything, anything in the world, they’ll do war first. [...]

I will be different.” “How many tragedies follow those words,” [...].

I am cursed,” says Mulaghesh, “with an abundance of things I wish to say, as we are well aware, Prime Minister.

an elderly gentleman in Brost can make glass directly from sand just by having an argument with it;