The Spider's War

Thoughtfulness and kindness and love, I contend, are so much the way we expect the world to be that they become invisible as air. We only see war and violence and hatred as something happening, I suggest, because they stand out as aberrations. In my experience, even in the midst of war, many lives are untouched by battle. And even in a life of conflict, violence is outweighed by its absence.

I find that unless we are very, very careful there can be a difference between who we are and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

There’s only one utter ending for each of us, and it isn’t one we reach toward. Until then, it’s the next change, and the next change, and the next. And profound change, even when it’s the one you prayed for, is displacing.

The only ones untouched by the keen madness of the times were the children and the dogs. And the dogs seemed a little nervous.

When you start talking about killed friends and lost babies, justice and revenge are two names for the same dog.

fault. From the start, it had been him. He had brought Basrahip back from the Sinir Kushku. He had let the priests poison his mind and through him the minds of all Antea. Anyone who might have

I don't know what justice is," she said. "That's because it isn't the sort of thing you discover. It's a thing you make." She looked at him, and he shrugged. "There are things you find out in the world. Rocks and streams and trees. And there are things you make. Like a house, or a song. It's not that houses and songs aren't real, but you don't just find them in a field someplace and haul them back home with you. They have to be worked at. Made.

A monstrous talent that could do anything because no one had managed to convince it of what was impossible.

The story of a person could never be as complex as they actually were because then it would take as much time to know someone as it did to be them. Reputation, even when deserved, inevitably meant simplification, and every simplification deformed.

I find that unless we are very, very careful there can be a difference between who we are and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. I

We only understand other people by imagining what we would do in their position. What

As far as I can tell, life’s just one flaming piece of shit after another, except when it’s a bunch of them all at once. But

Every war was the precursor for the wars that followed, a slaughter that justified the slaughters to come. And