Matthew Woodring Stover · 418 pages
Rating: (11.5K votes)
“The dark is generous and it is patient and it always wins – but in the heart of its strength lies its weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.
Love is more than a candle.
Love can ignite the stars.”
“A pair of starfighters. Jedi starfighters. Only two.
Two is enough.
Two is enough because the adults are wrong, and their younglings are right.
Though this is the end of the age of heroes, it has saved its best for last.”
“And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only droids around you that implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow. In the end you don't even want to. In the end, you do not even want to. In the end, the shadow is all you have left. Because the shadow understands you, the shadow forgives you, the shadow gathers you unto itself—And within your furnace heart, you burn in your own flame.”
“Anakin.” Obi-Wan’s voice had gone soft, and his hand was warm on Anakin’s arm. “There is no other Jedi I would rather have at my side right now. No other man.”
Anakin turned, and found within Obi-Wan’s eyes a depth of feeling he had only rarely glimpsed in all their years together; and the pure uncomplicated love that rose up within him then felt like a promise from the Force itself.
“I… I wouldn’t have it any other way, Master.”
“I believe,” his onetime Master said with a gently humorous look of astonishment at the words coming out of his mouth, “that you should get used to calling me Obi-Wan.”
“The dark is generous, and it is patient. It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt. The dark can be patient, because the slightest drop of rain will cause those seeds to sprout. The rain will come, and the seeds will sprout, for the dark is the soil in which they grow, and it is the clouds above them, and it waits behind the star that gives them light. The dark’s patience is infinite. Eventually, even stars burn out.”
“This truth: that he, the avatar of light, Supreme Master of the Jedi Order, the fiercest, most impeccable, most devastatingly powerful foe the darkness had ever known...
just-
didn't-
have it.”
“The dark is generous. Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from us the truths of others. The dark protects us from what we dare not know.”
“I am called a great swordsman because I invented a lethal style; but who is greater, the creator of a killing form—or the master of the classic form?"
"I'm very flattered that you would consider me a master but really—"
"Not a master. The master.”
“So this is how liberty dies," she was saying to herself. "With cheering, and applause.”
“His agony somehow became an invisible hand, stretching out through the Force, a hand that found her, far away, alone in her apartment in the dark, a hand that felt the silken softness of her skin and the sleek coils of her hair, a hand that dissolved into a field of pure energy, of pure feeling that reached inside her—
And now he felt her, really felt her in the Force, as though she could have been some kind of Jedi, too, but more than that: he felt a bond, a connection, deeper and more intimate than he’d ever had before with anyone, even Obi-Wan; for a precious eternal instant he was her … he was the beat of her heart and he was the motion of her lips and he was her soft words as though she spoke a prayer to the stars—”
“In every exchange, Obi-Wan gave ground. It was his way.”
“Until the time is right, disappear we will.”
“Which would leave Mace and Agen Kolar- -both among the greatest bladesbeings the Jedi Order has ever produced”
“He could feel the end of the battle approaching, and so could the blur of the Sith he faced in the Force, the shadow had become a pulsar of fear.
Easily, almost effortlessly, he turned the shadow's fear into a weapon: he angled the battle to bring them both out onto the window ledge.
Out in the wind. Out with the lightning. Out on a rain-slicked ledge above a half kilometer drop.
Out where the shadow's fear's fear made it hesitate.
Out where the shadow's fear turned some of it's Force-powered speed into a Force-powered grip on the slippery permacrete.
Out where Mace could flick his blade in one precise arc and slash the shadow's lightsaber in half.
One piece flipped back in through the cut open window. The other tumbled from opening fingers, bounced on the ledge, and fell through the rain towards the distant alleys below.
Now the shadow was only Palpatine: old and shrunken, thinning hair bleached white by time and care, face lined with exhaustion.
'For all your power, my lord,you are no Jedi. All you are, my lord,' Mace said evenly, staring past his blade, 'is under arrest.”
“Not his penetrating intellect, or his talents with the Force, or his unmatched skills with a lightsaber."
-Matthew Stover on Mace Windu”
“Now Obi Wan did face him.
'Palpatine faced Mace and Agen and Kit and Saesee-four of the greatest swordsmen our order has ever produced. By Himself. Even both of us together wouldn't have a chance.'
'True,' Yoda said, 'But both of us apart, a chance we might create...”
“Have you had contact with any other survivors?"
"Only one," the Alderaanian senator said grimly. "Lock onto my coordinates. He's waiting for you.”
“You’ve been off fighting the war in the Outer Rim. You don’t know what it’s been like, dealing with all the petty squabbles and special interests and greedy, grasping fools in the Senate, and Palpatine’s constant, cynical, ruthless maneuvering for power—he carves away chunks of our freedom and bandages the wounds with tiny scraps of security. And for what? Look at this planet, Obi-Wan! We have given up so much freedom—how secure do we look?”
“And Anakin is on his way despite the dread boiling through his blood. That’s what makes him a real hero. Not the way the HoloNet labels him; not without fear, but stronger than fear.
He looks the dragon in the eye and doesn’t even slow down.”
“...you must understand that not even the Jedi know all there is to be known about the Force; no mortal mind can. We speak of the will of the Force as someone ignorant of gravity might say it is the will of a river to flow to the ocean; it is a metaphor that describes our ignorance. The simple truth - if any truth is ever simple - is that we do not truly know what the will of the Force may be. We can never know. It is so far beyond our limited understanding that we can only surrender to its mystery.”
“Do or do not, there is no try. -Yoda”
“Ava’s Mum: – We are not like them, Ava. […] We have to be ready to fight, and when the enemy gets you, one day, you show them what I taught you. When they lock you in the darkness, become an arsonist. When they put you under house arrest, or defile your name in public, or make you live beneath the rules that will suffocate you, become an arsonist. When they put a pistol in your hand and make you shoot your best friend, and when they throw you in a death camp, when you see everyone around you get sick from the poison they’re feeding them, light a fire that will destroy them. A fire they won’t forget the next time they try to do it to someone else.”
“So it Goes’ from Slaughterhouse Five to remind myself not to dwell on anything I can’t control – bad shit happens; it’s part of life.”
“Christian psychology” and “improving your self-esteem” dominated”
“The walls of her stall were covered with graffiti. If it had been funny (“Pull here for MFA Degree” right below the toilet paper dispenser) she would’ve stayed longer, but it was mostly weird random names and dates.”
“She would hear the verbal balancing act: urgency mixed like gin amid the tonic of consideration.”
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