Quotes from Orb Sceptre Throne

“The problem with paths is that once you have chosen one, You cannot choose the others. Attributed to Gothos”
― Ian C. Esslemont, quote from Orb Sceptre Throne

“Kruppe wonders now, in the presentsight, as it were – or is it is? – what pedestrian activities or seemingly innocuous events will, in the hindsight of the future, be seen to be foreshadowings of the grievous event which may, or may not, come to pass, and which, by the forewarning, may thusly be headed off.”
― Ian C. Esslemont, quote from Orb Sceptre Throne

“when you think everyone around you is mad, that’s then you should start to suspect it’s actually you.”
― Ian C. Esslemont, quote from Orb Sceptre Throne

“Freedom - rather more complicated in the concrete than the abstract, yes?”
― Ian C. Esslemont, quote from Orb Sceptre Throne

“Tyranny remains because the weak and fearful seek it.”
― Ian C. Esslemont, quote from Orb Sceptre Throne

“They are the words of an old man who has lost a great friend. A mourning elder who looks at life only to see death. Such a dark vision must not guide a people. We who see life, who look ahead to the future. We must lead. And”
― Ian C. Esslemont, quote from Orb Sceptre Throne

“The truth is that the goal of existence is to kill you.”
― Ian C. Esslemont, quote from Orb Sceptre Throne

“Scillara was not cruel; she was simply not interested and he did not hold this against her. It seemed to him that frankly most people by temperament and character should not be thrust into the role of parents. She was simply uncharacteristic in admitting it. He”
― Ian C. Esslemont, quote from Orb Sceptre Throne

“Did we not look out together upon the dark waters of the lake
And behold there the constellations
Of both hemispheres at once?

-Love Songs of the Cinnamon Wastes”
― Ian C. Esslemont, quote from Orb Sceptre Throne

“Give and give of y’self till there’s nothing left! Only then can you have something! If you take, you diminish things till there’s nothing left. If you give, you provide and things grow! Yes?”
― Ian C. Esslemont, quote from Orb Sceptre Throne

“Speak not to me of the meddling Jaghut!”
― Ian C. Esslemont, quote from Orb Sceptre Throne

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Popular quotes

“The Dimwit's Guide to the Female Mind might assist your efforts in understanding human females. But it must be pointed out that this subject can be a dangerous adventure and should be undertaken with extreme caution. After all, human males have been trying to understand their females for generations, and most of the time they come away from these encounters looking like someone stuck their tails into an electric socket.”
― Anne Bishop, quote from Marked in Flesh

“[A Chinese Restaurant.] Roma is seated alone at the booth. Lingk is at the booth next to him. Roma ,i>is talking to him.
* * *

Roma: . . . Eh? What I’m saying, what is our life? (Pause.) It’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment? (Pause.) And what is it that we’re afraid of? Loss. What else? (Pause.) The bank,/i> closes. We get sick, my wife died on a plane, the stock market collapsed . . . the house burnt down . . . what of these happen . . . ? None of ’em. We worry anyway. What does this mean? I’m not secure. How can I be secure? (Pause.) Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what’s beyond all measure? That’s a sickness. That’s a trap. There is no measure. Only greed. How can we act? The right way, we would say, to deal with this: “There is a one-in-a million chance that so and so will happen. . . . Fuck it, it won’t happen to me. . . .” No. We know that’s not the right way I think. (Pause.) We say the correct way to deal with this is “There is a one-in-so-and-so chance that this will happen . . . God protect me. I am powerless, let it not happen to me. . . .” But no to that. I say. There’s something else. What is it? “If it happens, AS IT MAY for that is not within our powers, I will deal with it, just as I do today with what draws my concern today.” I say this is how we must act. I do those things which seem correct to me today. I trust myself. And if security concerns me, I do that which today I think will make me secure. And every day I do that, when that day arrives that I need a reserve, (a) odds are that I have it, and (b) the true reserve that I have is the strength that I have of acting each day without fear. (Pause.) According to the dictates of my mind. (Pause.)”
― David Mamet, quote from Glengarry Glen Ross

“Some women's arms are places of exile; others are a native land.”
― Amin Maalouf, quote from Balthasar's Odyssey

“Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Picnic, Lightning

“I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like "fidelity" and "adultery", by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that I had him I'd be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.”
― Erica Jong, quote from Fear of Flying

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