Doctrine Of Labyrinths Quotes

It is a rose planted in your heart, and as it's thorns tear you, so does it thrive and flower

I gave up on cussing - I'd run out of words filthy enough - and just started praying.

I catch a flash of red-gold beneath the surface of the water, and realize that there are koi in the pond, massive, serene, and I wonder: are they dreams of fish, or fish who dream?

Sacred bleeding fuck,” I said, because, I mean its one thing to know your crazy hocus brother sees ghosts, and a whole different thing when you find out they’re telling him bedtime stories.

Consider the stars. Among them are no passions, no wars. They know neither love nor hatred. Did man but emulate the stars, would not his soul become clear and radiant as they are? But man's spirit draws him like a moth to the ephemera of this world, and in their heat he is consumed entire.

The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines. But these seekers, too, are saved—by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed down through millenniums. It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart. Alas, where is the guide, that fond virgin, Ariadne, to supply the simple clue that will give us courage to face the Minotaur, and the means then to find our way to freedom when the monster has been met and slain?

The obligation d'âme meant that his only allegiance was to Felix, making them a separate kingdom of two, with Felix as king and Mildmay as ministers, army, and populace all combined in one. A stormy little kingdom, I thought, with periodic flare-ups of civil war and a magnificently unstable government. And I was glad I wasn’t a citizen of it.

Felix just sat there, not smirking exactly - or not so as you could call him on it - but clearly happy with how unhappy he'd managed to make all of us.

The dead person is not truly dead until the last person who rememebers them dies.

It occurred to me that it said something very unpleasant about both of us that we saw concern and kindness as attacks.

Well fuck me sideways 'til I cry

You know how sometimes you can be going along and do something or say something, and suddenly you *know* yourself? I mean, it's like you're looking at somebody else, and it's just so fucking clear you want to hit something.

The rats we met the size of small dogs and they watched us go by like they'd figured out that what People were for was feeding rats.

Was you born this fucking dumb, Milly-Fox, or do you practice every Dixieme?

'You like jealousy. You like knowing people want you.' He wasn't talking about sex, and my heart slowed a little. 'Is it not natural to want to be liked?' 'That ain't what you want. It's like you got to have everybody's heart, and if they don't give it, you rip it out and watch it bleed.'

If I was really, really lucky, Felix might throw a fireball at me, and I'd get out of the rest of this freakshow.

I’m a cat burglar.

I miss my fox-headed brother. Keeper

His eyes were green and cold and brilliant with murder.

There were so many lies, all of them precious, all of them necessary.

What you're asking me to do is monstrous." "So? Ain't we both monsters?

You put a guy who wants to control everything in the same room with a guy who’d rather wlak into a bonfire than listen when somebody tells him not to, and it’s your own damn fault if you’re surprised when things get ugly.

There ain’t nothing worse than getting fired by somebody you hate, because it means they

Some days I think I’m too stupid to be let out on my own, and then there’s the days that prove it.

He smiled. Not one of the dazzlers he used to get his own way. Just a smile, a little one kind of crooked. And Kethe, it was like I’d never been made at him at all.

Felix’s rather rueful admiration seemed to distress Mildmay even more than his anger had.

He had been exercising the caution of the fox he resembled, who walked into nothing without checking first to see if it was a trap.

There are no gardens in the Mirador. Only graveyards.

He gave me a look, indecipherable as all Mildmay’s looks were.

He wasn’t talking to me; he sounded like somebody reciting a poem, and his eyes were wide and dreaming and stark barking mad.

My brother, Mildmay, my fox, who’d guided and guarded me all the way across Kekropia.

He’d learned the key thing about any serious conversation with Felix, which was that you couldn’t let him distract you.

Flat she might be, but not stupid.

Gideon was there, warm and green and smelling slightly of cloves but not at all of bitterness and death, and I could hear no voices in my head at all.

Is it so wrong to be needed?

Powers and saints, if she was any flatter, they’d be using her to pave the roads.

Every maze has a monster at its heart.

He never liked things that weren’t his idea first.

The future felt like a herd of buffalo stampeding straight at me, and all I wanted was to get the fuck out of the way.

I wanted to feel his strength; I wanted to feel him. I didn’t care how anymore. I just wanted him to touch me.

Mildmay’s anger was like a third person sitting between us-which was all the more unfortunate as there was barely room for two.

The duke’s house was a three-story affair with gilded pillars and marble facing, and it was as ugly as a gator in a pink satin ball gown.

He met my eyes-only for a moment, but enough that I knew we saw each other, as we so rarely did, plainly.

You’re going to eat him alive and never even notice.

He was big, taller than me and bulky, with dark red-brown hair queued back like a flashie, and light brown eyes that looked as clever and fake as glass.

Titan Clocks were made with iron and gold and human bone; they did not break, and they did not fail.

Anyone wanting to cause trouble in the Mirador should be fascinated by Felix.

How many times do you have to learn? Don’t underestimate him.

I don’t want to make waves, you see, and that means I had better know what’s the pond before I go jumping in.

It’s a strange fucking world, and mostly the joke’s on us.

I’d fallen for Ginevra Thomas’s big blue eyes, and the way she brought her chin up when she was facing something she was scared of. Stupid, Milly-Fox. Very stupid.

The eye sockets of their skulls are dark, like they’ve got all the night inside their heads.

The indignities visited on his corpse could not touch him; in death he was inviolate. I had no such grace.

You must be the only person in the Mirador who hasn’t realized Mildmay would walk on glass knives for you.

Don’t worry, darling. I only want you for your mind.

They did not care that this serene harmony was built on blood and death and pain.

I wondered what the real reason was that Kolkhis hadn’t properly taught him to read; it certainly wasn’t the reason he always gave, that he was too stupid to read.

I have a long and inglorious history of wanting what hurts me.

This was what he’d been before Strych got him. This was the part of him that was my brother down to the bone.

I’d seen him hurting, so he turned around and hurt me. Like a clockwork bear. Wind him up and watch him go.

You help me become someone who can save himself.

It's like you got to have everybody's heart, and if they don't give it, you rip it out and watch it bleed.

I wonder what they think of me in their world of light, deaf to the broken patterns around them. I wonder what stories they have invented, to explain me when I cannot explain myself.

I follow the voice, follow the sobbing and cursing, follow it down a twisting, tightening spiral until, somewhere far beneath the earth, among the roots on the monstrous clock, I find him.

What is mikkary?” “The feeling a room gets when there’s been murder done in it,” Mildmay said. Kay’s face was very still for a moment; then he said slowly, “Yes, I know that feeling well.

It was an effort not to let my fingers knot together, but Malkar had taught me, via his own brutal and unscrupulous methods, to counterfeit a nobleman’s poise, and the old instincts were not lost.

He smiled at me over his shoulder, a little smile and kind of twisted, but it meant he was glad I was here, and it made me warm all the way to my fucking toes. Yeah, I’m an idiot, thanks for noticing.

I saw his smile, and I wanted, with the sudden pitiless clarity of a lightning bolt, to drag him away-out of the engine’s maw, of the labyrith’s heart, out of the cold and sleepless dark beneath Summerdown.

The darkness was crowding up around me, and, while I couldn’t hear the Virtu any longer, I was becoming fretfully aware of something else, a noise like some vast heartbeat, only with too many pulses. Mélusine, breathing.

In a choice between committing an act of grievous heresy-possibly even an act of evil-and losing my brother, I had chosen to commit heresy. And no matter how much it sickened me, I knew I would make the same choice again.

I knew that look, that very slight hitch in his eyebrow that said he knew I was going to do what I wanted anyway, and he wasn’t going to waste his breath on me. I did not care for that look, but it was better than another quarrel.

My nerves still raw from the confronation with Astyanax, I was burningly aware of Mildmay’s beauty, his bones, his grace, the walls and shadows in his eyes. Burningly aware that he was my brother and, more than that, he did not want me.

I felt him in my mind, even more vividly than I felt him in my body, a hurtful, hateful rending presence, like the color of blood, like the taste of iron, like the scent of burning, destroying everything in his path until he reached for the core of my power and seized it.

He turned and caught me in a kiss that probably looked passionate, but was nothing more than a brutal, numbing intrusion, a blind for the compulsion he cast, winding me about in a shroud of briars, ensnaring me, so I could tell no one the truth, tell no one what he had done and how.

Faith Cowry turned out to be little, dark, skinny, bright-eyed as a wren, and not the least bit stupid. And despite what Estella’d said, she didn’t strike me as absentminded either, just somebody who knew what mattered, and it didn’t include showing up on time to meet Estella’s low-life friends.

I’d seen the way he watched Felix when he thought nobody was paying attention, and it was the kind of look that makes your skin crawl. He laid traps for Felix, too, cunning things that Felix waltzed right out of without seeming to see. Sometimes you could almost hear Lord Shannon’s teeth grinding.

It was starting to scare me a little, how easy I could read his face and what he did and didn’t say. That ain’t the same as being able to handle him, and I wasn’t even pretending I had any kind of grip on what he might do when he was topside, but I was getting to where I knew his madness like it was an old friend.

I felt like an old bone being worried by three dogs, like sooner or later one of them was going to pull too hard, and I was just going to snap in half. The Money Dog, the Fever Dog, and the Dreams Dog I called them, and I didn’t know which of them I should be scared of most. They all three had teeth like alligators.

There is a terrible weight to that never from Malkar Gennadion, who is also Brinvillier Strych-and who knows how many other names he may have had? Who knows how many lives he may have held and used and discarded, how many other lives he may have left ruined in his wake? I wonder if even Malkar himself knows any longer.

He was older than me and a hocus and educated and he talked flash, and he made like that was all there was to it, and it was him doing me the favor, being out here in the middle of absolutely fucking nothing, with the sky like some kind of monster, just waiting ’til you weren’t watching to lean down and swallow you whole.

Colors got funny, like there were too many of them packed in behind your basic blue or green or whatever. Sometimes I almost thought I could see the colors around people that Felix was always yammering about. And my hearing got sharper to the point that Mavortian and Bernard yelling at each other was actually painful. I mean, it was a pain and I was used to that, but now it hurt. And I couldn’t sleep.

I watched him, trying to decide if he was lying about how badly he was hurt, and suddenly like throwing open a pair of shutters, I saw the muscles of his back moving beneath his skin, the strength of his shoulders, the long-fingered grace of his hands. I had always known that Mildmay, despite being a good half foot shorter than I, was as muscular and agile as an acrobat, but now I saw that he was beautiful.

What happened was I hit the cold place inside my head, the place where I’d been when I killed people for a living, the place especially where I ended up when a job looked like it was going bad. I can’t describe it so it makes sense. It’s really cold and really clear and nothing in the world matters except not fucking up the job-in this case, getting my damn brother on board this ship because it was what he’d said he wanted.

It rattled me. Not just the look or the question-although those were bad enough-but the realization that he’d simply taken a shortcut through the conversation I’d anticipated having and reached the finish line ahead of me. I’d known he was much smarter than he seemed, but I hadn’t appreciated before how quick he was, that his mind was not in any way hobbled by the scar that slowed and distorted his speech. It was so terribly easy to forget that.

Here in the labyrinth, I struggle to find words to describe what I feel. Up on the mountaintop, I knew the language to describe God: majestic, transcendent, all-powerful, heavenly Father, Lord, and King. In this vocabulary, God remains stubbornly located in a few select places, mostly in external realms above or beyond: heaven, the church, doctrine, or the sacraments. What happens in the labyrinth seems vague, perhaps even theologically elusive. Like countless others, I have been schooled in vertical theology. Western culture, especially Western Christianity, has imprinted a certain theological template upon the spiritual imagination: God exists far off from the world and does humankind a favor when choosing to draw close. Sermons declared that God’s holiness was foreign to us and sin separated us from God. Yes, humanity was made in God’s image, but we had so messed things up in the Garden of Eden that any trace of God in us was obscured, if not destroyed. Whether conservative or liberal, most American churches teach some form of the idea that God exists in holy isolation, untouched by the messiness of creation, and that we, God’s children, are morally and spiritually filthy, bereft of all goodness, utterly unworthy to stand before the Divine Presence. In its crudest form, the role of religion (whether through revivals, priesthood, ritual, story, sacraments, personal conversion, or morality) is to act as a holy elevator between God above and those muddling around down below in the world.

There was a sound in my head, a song. But I heard it, not with my ears, nor even with my mind as I heard Gideon’s voice. I heard it with my blood, with my bones, with the magic that lay coiled within me like a nest of half-sleeping dragons. I heard it with the remnants of my madness that not even all the wisdom and care of the celebrants of the Gardens of Nephele had been able to eradicate, and it was through my madness that I recognized that mournful, broken little melody: the sound of the Virtu singing to itself.

While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging “center of narrative gravity” (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time. Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord’s Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah. The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc. Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science. But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.

The author of “The Little Labyrinth” indicates that the Theodotians maintained that their view—that Jesus was completely human, and not divine, but that he was adopted to be the Son of God—had been the doctrine taught by the apostles themselves and by most of the church in Rome until the time of Bishop Victor, at the end of the second century.

I had been addicted to phoenix six years ago, just as I had been addicted to Malkar. I had beaten the addiction and not taken phoenix since. I was horrified by how comforting the taste was. I had known people in Pharaohlight, who had insisted that phoenix was tasteless, but they were wrong. It tasted like tears.

Malkar laughed, the low, purring chuckle that I had once thought wonderful, and leaned over to kiss me, pressing his mouth against mine. The familarity of his mouth, of the situation, was itself erotic, a groove worn by the patterns of the past; I could feel my body wanting to respond to it.

I had hoped that I might replace the burning blackness in my mind with the simple, remote darkness of the night sky. Sometimes I could calm myself that way, but tonight the longer I stared at the sky, its untouchable beauty, the more I wanted to hurt someone.

Malkar’s suite was in the part of the Mirador called Fra Barbarossa, still lavish with the tastes of long-dead Ophidian kings. The walls were faced with white marble and hung with gold brocade. Statues of ancient heroes stood in niches, watching me with painted eyes. I knew all their names, all their histories, and their very indifference woke me, alarmed me, and I was caught frozen, able to neither walk forward into Hell nor to turn and walk away.

I understood him then, as tendrils of the violet-red miasma that surrounded him reached out hungrily toward me. He was not interested in my body, as I’d already realized; for Brother Orphelin, celibacy was not a difficult discipline. His lust was for secrets, for shame and guilt, for petty darknesses. More and worse, he was a sophisticate: his pleasure was not in the secret itself, but in the power it gave him over me, in his knowledge of what it did to me to know that he knew.

There ain’t much to be said about walking across Kekropia aside from the boredom of it.

I can hear broken edges, failures, a great emptiness where there should be beauty. I can hear a faint, sobbing thread of song, running through the desolution like a tickle of tainted water through a battlefield strewn with corpses. It is all my fault. I cannot remember how or why, but I can feel my guilt in everything I touch.

I wanted him-wanted the coarse fox-red hair he braided back and tied with a scrap of indigo ribbon, wanted his body, his broad shoulders and stocky frame, lithe and muscular as an acrobat’s. I wanted his deep, slurred Lower City voice, wanted the growl that threaded through his words. I wanted his eyes, cold absinthe-green jade, wanted his face, those feral bones, that stone scar. I wanted to watch passion transform him from stone and jade to flesh and blood, wanted to know if he cured out when he came, and what he sounded like when he did.

His look was predatory, gloating. All the power in this room was his, and he knew it.

Going moral on me, Milly-Fox? Keeper asked in my head, in that particular drawling voice she used to let you know she hadn’t thought you were sissy enough or stupid enough to get hung up on something like this. She’d used it on me when she told me she was going to start training me to kill people and I’d never quite lost the sting of it, like salt on raw skin. And even though I’d seen her do it to other kids and even though I’d left her, just knowing that was what she’d say and how she’d say it was still enough to make me do stuff I knew better than to touch.

She is the goddess of death, despair, stagnation, abandoned places. They say she is the only god who will protect them now, but they cannot reach her without a maze.

Isn’t it what you want, to have every man who sees you desire you?