Almighty Suspect Quotes

Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.

Wylan—and the obliging Kuwei—will get the weevil working,” Kaz continued. “Once we have Inej, we can move on Van Eck’s silos.” Nina rolled her eyes. “Good thing this is all about getting our money and not about saving Inej. Definitely not about that.” “If you don’t care about money, Nina dear, call it by its other names.” “Kruge? Scrub? Kaz’s one true love?” “Freedom, security, retribution.” “You can’t put a price on those things.” “No? I bet Jesper can. It’s the price of the lien on his father’s farm.” The sharpshooter looked at the toes of his boots. “What about you, Wylan? Can you put a price on the chance to walk away from Ketterdam and live your own life? And Nina, I suspect you and your Fjerdan may want something more to subsist on than patriotism and longing glances. Inej might have a number in mind too. It’s the price of a future, and it’s Van Eck’s turn to pay.” Matthias was not fooled. Kaz always spoke logic, but that didn’t mean he always told truth. “The Wraith’s life is worth more than that,” said Matthias. “To all of us.” “We get Inej. We get our money. It’s as simple as that.” “Simple as that,” said Nina. “Did you know I’m next in line for the Fjerdan throne? They call me Princess Ilse of Engelsberg.” “There is no princess of Engelsberg,” said Matthias. “It’s a fishing town.” Nina shrugged. “If we’re going to lie to ourselves, we might as well be grand about it.” Kaz ignored her, spreading a map of the city over the table, and Matthias heard Wylan murmur to Jesper, “Why won’t he just say he wants her back?” “You’ve met Kaz, right?” “But she’s one of us.” Jesper’s brows rose again. “One of us? Does that mean she knows the secret handshake? Does that mean you’re ready to get a tattoo?” He ran a finger up Wylan’s forearm, and Wylan flushed a vibrant pink. Matthias couldn’t help but sympathize with the boy. He knew what it was to be out of your depth, and he sometimes suspected they could forgo all of Kaz’s planning and simply let Jesper and Nina flirt the entirety of Ketterdam into submission. Wylan pulled his sleeve down self-consciously. “Inej is part of the crew.” “Just don’t push it.” “Why not?” “Because the practical thing would be for Kaz to auction Kuwei to the highest bidder and forget about Inej entirely.” “He wouldn’t—” Wylan broke off abruptly, doubt creeping over his features. None of them really knew what Kaz would or wouldn’t do. Sometimes Matthias wondered if even Kaz was sure. “Okay, Kaz,” said Nina, slipping off her shoes and wiggling her toes. “Since this is about the almighty plan, how about you stop meditating over that map and tell us just what we’re in for.

By the end of the Latin lesson he was a hard-line atheist, and to prove it, he marched determinedly into the school tuckshop during break and bought himself a ham sandwich. The flesh of the swine passed his lips for the first time that day, and the failure of the Almighty to strike him dead with a thunderbolt proved to him what he had long suspected: that there was nobody up there with thunderbolts to hurl.

The great advantage of scientific abstraction is that it gives us a key to the mysterious processes enacted behind the scenes, where, leaving the colourful world of the theatre behind us, we enter into the ultimate reality of psychic dynamism and psychic meaningfulness. This knowledge strips the unconscious processes of all epiphenomenality and allows them to appear as what our whole experience tells us that they are—autonomous quantities. Consequently, every attempt to derive the unconscious from the conscious sphere is so much empty talk, a sterile, intellectual parlour-game. One suspects this wherever writers cheerfully talk of the “subconscious,” without apparently realizing what an arrogant prejudice they are presuming to express. How do they know, forsooth, that the unconscious is “lower” and not “higher” than the conscious? The only certain thing about this terminology is that consciousness deems itself higher—higher than the gods themselves. One day, let us hope, its “god-almightiness will make it quiver and quake”!

Even I," went on Spiro, "denounced blasphemers and thought it holy that each should yield a little of his blood to the Almighty Ones. Then I woke from darkness to find myself—a Head. At first I could not understand, for I was in love with Ah-eeda—and can a machine mate? But it is true that love is largely desire, and desire of the body. With the death of the body, desire died; and it may be that pride and ambition took its place. But, for all that, there were moments when I remembered my lost manhood and dreamed of Ah-eeda. Yes, though the laboratory of the Heads revealed wonders of which I had never dreamed, though I looked into your world and studied its languages and history, though I was worshipped as a god and endless life stretched ahead of me—nevertheless, I could see that the strength of my race was being sapped, its virility lost!" His voice broke. "In the face of such knowledge what were immortality and power? Could they compensate for one hour of life and love as humanity lived it? So I brooded. Then one day in the temple I looked into the face of a girl about to be bled and recognized Ah-eeda. In that moment, hatred of the fiends posing as gods and draining the vitality of deluded worshippers, crystallized and drove me to action. So it was I who denounced the Heads, aroused the people!" Spiro's voice broke; died. Miles and Ward stared at him, horrified; and after a while Miles exclaimed, "We never suspected! We would never have fought to maintain such a thing had we known!" "Nonetheless," said Spiro inflexibly, "you fought for it, and many people died and more are afraid. Superstition is a hard thing to kill. Already there are those who murmur that truly the Heads are gods and have called up demons from the underworld, as they threatened they would, to smite them with thunder until once more they yield blood in the temple. But I know that without blood the Heads must die miserably and the people be freed from their vampire existence. It is true that I too shall die, but that is nothing. I die gladly. Therefore, to keep the people from sacrificing blood, to show them that you are mortal and the Heads powerless to save the demons they have raised, you must be slain in front of the great palace. "Yes; you, too, must die for the people!

You see, we keep trying to bring God down to our own level, to our own limited range. We’ve shrunk him to the point that we’ve made him human; we have endowed him with all our own imperfections, all our own defects. The way we’ve made him, he’s neither almighty, nor just, nor compassionate. I’m not saying that there isn’t a God, I’m not saying that I don’t believe in God, it’s just that I believe that God is something so immense that it cannot fit inside the human mind. Just think of the ants that toil to make their subterranean corridors, coming and going in ranks, exemplary in their obedience to age-old rules. Man comes along and carelessly steps on their work, savagely scattering the fruits of their labour. What would the ants say if they could think? That a cataclysm had occurred? That some angry god was punishing them, and all sorts of other nonsense. Because the ants are so tiny and weak in comparison to man, that they can’t comprehend his actions; they simply sense his presence. And yet ants existed before man, and the difference between them is comparable and understandable. There’s no means of comparing man with what he calls God. We don’t have the ability to understand him, we simply suspect his existence.

This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not in body. More solitude and earlier hours! I suspect I have been allotting habitually too little time to religious exercises, as private devotion and religious meditation, Scripture-reading, etc. Hence I am lean and cold and hard. I had better allot two hours or an hour and a half daily. I have been keeping too late hours, and hence have had but a hurried half hour in a morning to myself. Surely the experience of all good men confirms the proposition that without a due measure of private devotions the soul will grow lean. But all may be done through prayer—almighty prayer, I am ready to say—and why not? For that it is almighty is only through the gracious ordination of the God of love and truth. O then, pray, pray, pray!—William Wilberforce

Is it not true? Believer, you will never prefer man to God, will you? Would you prefer to depend on an imperfect, changeable man’s promise rather than to rest on the promises of the unchangeable God? You would not dare say that, though I suspect you have acted as if you would. I am afraid our unbelief is such, that we would sometimes prefer the defective arm of flesh to the Almighty arm of God. What a disgrace this is! But when we are thinking straight, we must acknowledge that God’s “I am with you,” is better than the kindest assurance of the best of friends.

mustard seed and the moving of mountains are both metaphors. Faith, like a mustard seed, is an apparently small and insignificant thing that can achieve impossibly great things. What faith can achieve is like moving mountains or, as Luke would have it, like moving a mulberry tree. One suspects some early confusion of metaphors here. Nevertheless, the point is clear enough. Faith, for Jesus, is an almighty power, a power that can achieve the impossible.7