“Being alive and living aren't the same.”
“I'd burn the world down if it would make you smile”
“Amnesia was a soldier's best friend, and luckily, it could be taught. Missing limbs still ache, but missing memories never do.”
“Then he pulled Liam forward and pressed their lips together. The kiss was no longer than a second, but in that second, any walls between them fell. Liam's body was Syd's body; Syd's mind was Liam's mind. someones eyelashes tickled and they drew apart”
“Civilization without humanity was just a graveyard”
“Those who were defiant, like Marie, would defy until they dropped dead. The maudlin would weep and the deal makers would bargain and the jokers would joke, but every last one of them would die.”
“At the birth of a new world, there will be always pain.”
“A man with success had interests to protect. A man with nothing was far more dangerous.”
“He let Liam stand in front of him so he could lean on his bodyguard's shoulder. It was hard to stay standing...”
“Every revolution believes it can return something that has been lost, but nothing is ever the same. The only thing that edures are people.”
“The moment my son died my own heartbeat turned against me”
“He was a real-life soldier playing soldier from his memories of made up soldiers.”
“They understood what had really held the market together before. Violence. After all, what good was a debt if the creditor couldn't compel it to be paid?”
“Remaking the world wasn't always a stage show and a cheering crowd. Politics was just warfare by other means. The losers didn't get to hold rallies.”
“Again, Syd had that feeling, the past as an echo, repeating itself as it faded. The poor had longed for Jubilee to save them from the powerful, and now the one-time patrons longed for the Machine to do the same. Every revolution believes it can return something that had been lost, but nothing is ever the same. The only thing that endures are people. Syd saw that clearly now, and perhaps so too did Marie. You could serve a revolution, an idea that ended up an echo if itself, or you could serve people, with their maddening contradictions. You couldn't serve both. You had to choose.”
“I don't myself think much of science as a phase of human development. It has given us a lot of ingenious toys; they take our attention away from the real problems, of course, and since the problems are insoluble, I suppose we ought to be grateful for distraction. But the fact is, the human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them. Science hasn't given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn't given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new sins-not one! Indeed, it takes our old ones away. It's the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You'll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better off when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin. I don't think you help people by making their conduct of no importance-you impoverish them. As long as every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing. The king and the beggar had the same chance at miracles and great temptations and revelations. And that's what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own little individual lives. It makes us happy to surround our creature needs and bodily instincts with as much pomp and circumstance as possible. Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.”
“The profound originality of a divine-human pact in which both parties complain endlessly about each other has too rarely been acknowledged as such.”
“And there would be more partings, more losses, more wounds, over and over, again and again. He could change his destiny a hundred times, and each time another loss or separation would be waiting for him on the other side. As long as there is happiness, there will be sadness. As long as there is fortune, there will be misfortune.”
“Hey. What is it that famous person said? 'It'll all work out in the end, and if it doesn't, that means it's not the end yet'?”
“The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well--the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.”
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