The Fall

Power revealed is power sacrificed. The truly powerful exert their influence in ways unseen, unfelt. Some would say that a thing visible is a thing vulnerable.

Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness -

...there's something about maternal love - it might just be the strongest human spiritual bond there is.

There are men who bloom in chaos. You call them heroes or villains, depending on which side wins the war, but until the battle call they are but normal men who long for action, who lust for the opportunity to throw off the routine of their normal lives like a cocoon and come into their own. They sense a destiny larger than themselves, but only when structures collapse around them do these men become warriors.

What is life, in the end, but a series of small victories and larger failures?

We don’t discover, we don’t learn. We just remember things that we have forgotten…

Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait. Shapes looming outside our Platonic cave. We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple…when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us…

People who have lived their whole lives feeling half-complete. Who never truly fit anywhere in the world. Who never understood why they were here, or what they were meant for. Who never answered the call, because they never heard it. Because nothing ever spoke to them.

Miriam Sacher had survived polio as a child. To Abraham, she was simply the most exquisite little bird who could not fly.

In the face of such terror and dehumanization, human passion itself was an act of defiance.

Everything in our universe is ciphered and to know the cipher is to know the thing—and to know the thing is to command it.

Cars get girl names. Guns get guy names. What do knives get?

One must always name a weapon. You cannot trust that which you cannot call by name.

And yet one carries the sins of his forebears as one carries their features in his face. One bears their blood, and their honor or their blight.

In you, we have given this world a great gift—and of that, I have no doubt.

We, the over-class, have taken those basic human drives and advanced our own selves through their exploitation. We have monetized human consumption, manipulated morals and laws to direct the masses by fear or hatred, and, in doing so, have managed to create a system of wealth and remuneration that has concentrated the vast majority of the world’s wealth in the hands of a select few. Over the course of two thousand years,

An old man’s beliefs matter little. I am the past. You, the future. What are your beliefs?

We, the over-class, have taken those basic human drives and advanced our own selves through their exploitation. We have monetized human consumption, manipulated morals and laws to direct the masses by fear or hatred, and, in doing so, have managed to create a system of wealth and remuneration that has concentrated the vast majority of the world’s wealth in the hands of a select few.

so my wife took them up to a friend’s on Kinnelon Lake.” Not far enough,

Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness—cutting

This world is a motherfucker, isn’t it?” Angel nodded and said, “But it’s the only one we have.” Gus