Empire Of The Sun Quotes

Give me a shot to remember And you can take all the pain away from me A kiss and I will surrender The sharpest lives are the deadliest to lead A light to burn all the empires So bright the sun is ashamed to rise and be And I'm in love with all of those vampires So you can leave like the sane abandoned me

Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.

And this is the east shore?" Sadie asked. "You said something about that in London--my grandparents living on the east shore." Amos smiled. "Yes. Very good, Sadie. In ancient times, the east bank of the Nile was always the side of the living, the side where the sun rises. The dead were buried west of the river. It was considered bad luck, even dangerous, to live there. The tradition is still strong among... our people." Our people?" I asked, but Sadie muscled in with another question. So you can't live in Manhattan?" she asked. Amos's brow furrowed as he looked across at the Empire State Building. "Manhattan has other problems. Other gods. It's best we stay separate.

Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.

Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun.

The sun never set on the British empire, an Indian nationalist later sardonically commented, because even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark

Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity

A cruel queen does not mean an unsuccessful one. Under her guidance, Kenettra changed from a glittering gem into a clouded stone, and her empire became one to rule all others, a darkness that stretched from sun, to sea, to sky. - The Empire of the Wolf, translation by Tarsa Mehani

A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.

My memory is to the world as a drawing is to the photograph. Imperfect. More perfect. We remember what we must, what we choose to, because it is more beautiful and real than the truth.

Night will always be a time of fear and insecurity, and the heart will sink with the sun.

It is a mistake to believe we must know a thing to be influenced by it. It is a mistake to believe the thing must even be real.

We each have our lives... What matters is not how long those lives last, but what we do with them.

The sun's glow had given way to a brilliant twilight that colored the great mountains with violet and orange rivers.

Your fussy nursemaid of a wyvern is fine, by the way. I don't know how you wound up with a sweet thing like that for a mount, but he's content to sprawl in the sun on the foredeck. Can't say it makes the sailors particularly happy - especially cleaning up after him." Find somewhere safe, she'd told Abraxos. Had he somehow found the queen? Somehow known this was the only place she might stand a chance of surviving?

The man who hopes for the future delays its arrival, and the man who dreads it summons it to his door.

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.

Who said the British empire was gone?! When I travel around the world and see and hear the English language everywhere, I know that the empire on which the sun never sets, is still alive. It never died. It continued to exist, but in a different shape, its language, English, which has become the global language.

The Nelazan believed that there was beauty in darkness, and that the daylight was more profane. They saw the stars as the Thousand Eyes of Trell watching them. The sun was the single, jealous eye of Trell’s brother, Nalt. Since Nalt only had one eye, he made it blaze brightly to outshine his brother. The Nelazan, however, were not impressed, and preferred to worship the quiet Trell, who watched over them even when Nalt obscured the sky.

Atrocity is writ by quiet men in council chambers over crystal glasses of cool water. Strange little men with ashes in their hearts. Sans passion, sans hope… sans everything. Everything but fear.

Jim knew that he was awake and asleep at the same time, dreaming of the war and yet dreamed of by the war.

So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the oldfield pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. IT is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

After a few minutes Jim was forced to admit that he could recognize none of the constellations. Like everything else since the war, the sky was in a state of change. For all their movements, the Japanese aircraft were its only fixed points, a second zodiac above the broken land.

The flies festered over the bodies, in some way aware that the war had ended and determined to hoard every morsel of flesh for the coming famine of the peace.

Any government that places profit before people is pure evil.

But the truth is poor poetry

After a heavy snowfall one night in early December the snow formed a thick quilt from which the old man's face emerged like a sleeping child's above an eiderdown. Jim told himself that he never moved because he was warm under the snow.

MY MOTHER GETS DRESSED It is impossible for my mother to do even the simplest things for herself anymore so we do it together, get her dressed. I choose the clothes without zippers or buckles or straps, clothes that are simple but elegant, and easy to get into. Otherwise, it's just like every other day. After bathing, getting dressed. The stockings go on first. This time, it's the new ones, the special ones with opaque black triangles that she's never worn before, bought just two weeks ago at her favorite department store. We start with the heavy, careful stuff of the right toes into the stocking tip then a smooth yank past the knob of her ankle and over her cool, smooth calf then the other toe cool ankle, smooth calf up the legs and the pantyhose is coaxed to her waist. You're doing great, Mom, I tell her as we ease her body against mine, rest her whole weight against me to slide her black dress with the black empire collar over her head struggle her fingers through the dark tunnel of the sleeve. I reach from the outside deep into the dark for her hand, grasp where I can't see for her touch. You've got to help me a little here, Mom I tell her then her fingertips touch mine and we work her fingers through the sleeve's mouth together, then we rest, her weight against me before threading the other fingers, wrist, forearm, elbow, bicep and now over the head. I gentle the black dress over her breasts, thighs, bring her makeup to her, put some color on her skin. Green for her eyes. Coral for her lips. I get her black hat. She's ready for her company. I tell the two women in simple, elegant suits waiting outside the bedroom, come in. They tell me, She's beautiful. Yes, she is, I tell them. I leave as they carefully zip her into the black body bag. Three days later, I dream a large, green suitcase arrives. When I unzip it, my mother is inside. Her dress matches her eyeshadow, which matches the suitcase perfectly. She's wearing coral lipstick. "I'm here," she says, smiling delightedly, waving and I wake up. Four days later, she comes home in a plastic black box that is heavier than it looks. In the middle of a meadow, I learn a naked more than naked. I learn a new way to hug as I tighten my fist around her body, my hand filled with her ashes and the small stones of bones. I squeeze her tight then open my hand and release her into the smallest, hottest sun, a dandelion screaming yellow at the sky.

In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war.

To His Coy Mistress Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow; An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.

For all his youth, he seemed to be willing himself to the edge of an adult despair.

Neither is it the acme of excellence if you fight and conquer and the whole Empire says, “Well done!

A single death, wrote one ancient king, is a tragedy, but a genocide can only be understood through statistics.

They drove south with the night falling soft and blue around them. Away to their right the Front Range stood out against the last red ribbon of the dying day like ramparts of some dread empire. Through the open windows came the smell of cooling earth and sage long baked by the sun.

Alternative Anthem. Put the kettle on Put the kettle on It is the British answer to Armageddon. Never mind taxes rise Never mind trains are late One thing you can be sure of and that’s the kettle, mate. It’s not whether you lose It’s not whether you win It’s whether or not you’ve plugged the kettle in. May the kettle ever hiss May the kettle ever steam It is the engine that drives our nation’s dream. Long live the kettle that rules over us May it be limescale free and may it never rust. Sing it on the beaches Sing it from the housetops The sun may set on empire but the kettle never stops.

The fool believes the iniquities of the world are the fault of other men. Gibson’s voice, dry as old manuscript pages, had never been more clear. The truly wise try to change themselves, which is the more difficult and less grand task.

Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free. Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward among the furthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged. ...In these enlightened days, of course, no one believes a word of it.

All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war.

In the talcum on the floor around him he could see the imprints of his mother's feet. She had moved from side to side, propelled by an over-eager partner, perhaps one of the Japanese officers to whom she was teaching to tango. Jim tried out the dance steps himself, which seemed far more violent than any tango he had ever seen, and managed to fall and cut his hand on the broken mirror.

You're not like other Wasps." "Aren't I?" Aagen smiled, but it was a painful smile. "No doubt you've killed my kinsmen by the score." "A few," Salma allowed. "Well, next time you shed my kinden's blood, think on this: we are but men, no less nor more than other men, and we strive and feel joy and fail as men have always done. We live in the darkness that is the birthright of us all, that of hurt and ignorance, only sometimes... sometimes there comes the sun." He let the bowl fall from his fingers to the floor, watching it spin and settle, unbroken.

Augustine once said that if there are such things as the past and the future, they do not exist as such but are only the present in their own times. The past, he says, exists only in memory and the future only in expectation. Neither is real.

We live in stories, and in stories, we are subject to phenomena beyond the mechanisms of space and time. Fear and love, death and wrath and wisdom, these are as much part of our universe as light and gravity.

His mother and father were agnostics, and Jim respected devout Christians in the same way that he respected people who were members of the Graf Zeppelin Club or shopped at the Chinese department stores, for their mastery of an exotic foreign ritual. Besides, those who worked hardest for others, like Mrs. Philips and Mrs. Gilmour and Dr. Ransome, often held beliefs that turned out to be correct.

Already a sizable traffic jam blocked the Bund. Once again the crush and clutter of Shanghai had engulfed its invaders.

Dangerous things, names. A kind of curse, defining us that we might live up to them, or giving us something to run away from.

To his surprise he felt a moment of regret, of sadness that his quest for his mother and father would soon be over. As long as he searched for them he was prepared to be hungry and ill, but now that the search had ended he felt saddened by the memory of all he had been through, and of how much he had changed. He was closer now to the ruined battlefields and this fly-infested truck, to the nine sweet potatoes in the sack below the driver's seat, even in a sense to the detention center, than he would ever be again to his house in Amherst Avenue.

The world’s soft the way the ocean is. Ask any sailor what I mean. But even when it is at its most violent, Hadrian . . . focus on the beauty of it. The ugliness of the world will come at you from all sides. There’s no avoiding it. All the schooling in the universe won’t stop that.

The dead were buried above ground, the loose soil heaped around them. The heavy rains of the monsoon months softened the mounds, so that they formed outlines of the bodies within them, as if this small cemetery beside the military airfield were doing its best to resurrect a few of the millions who had died in the war. Here and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts.

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go. It was just where I went.

The practiced ear could hear the calculation behind every word like fishhooks in the mind.

That’s what an empire is,” he said, “an orchestrator of gravity, a sun around which all weaker things spin.

As the ancient sea was cruel, so too is that blacker sea, vaster by far, that fills the void between the suns like water.

The sun had been so much brighter then, in his memories. It had shone every day.

The honour of Mughal men was not as irretrievably bound to the sexual chastity of their women.

With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem. 8.

Civilization is a kind of prayer: that by right action we might bring to pass the peace and quiet that is the ardent desire of every decent heart.

I will go home and much of what I will have to say will seem strange to the people of my village... But I will teach and work and things will happen, slowly and swiftly. At times it will seem that nothing changes at all... and then again... the sudden dramatic events which make history leap into the future. And then quiet again. Retrogression even. Guns, murder, revolution. And I even will have moments when I wonder if the quiet was not better than all that death and hatred. But I will look about my village at the illiteracy and disease and ignorance and will not wonder long. And perhaps... perhaps I will be a great man... I mean perhaps I will hold on to the substance of truth and find my way always with the right course... and perhaps for it I will be butchered in my bed some night by the servants of empire... ...perhaps the things I believe now for my country will be wrong and outmoded, and I will not understand and do terrible things to have things my way or merely to keep my power. Don't you see that there will be young men and women, not British soldiers then, but my own black countrymen... to step out of the shadows some evening and slit my then useless throat? Don't you see they have always been there... that they always will be. And that such a thing as my own death will be an advance? They who might kill me even... actually replenish me!

I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.

Every night, around midnight GMT, the Sun sets on the Cayman Islands, and doesn’t rise over the British Indian Ocean Territory until after 1:00 a.m. For that hour, the little Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific are the only British territory in the Sun. The Pitcairn Islands have a population of a few dozen people, the descendants of the mutineers from the HMS Bounty. The islands became notorious in 2004 when a third of the adult male population, including the mayor, were convicted of child sexual abuse. As awful as the islands may be, they remain part of the British Empire, and unless they’re kicked out, the two-century-long British daylight will continue.

She put her hand on his shoulder and gave a soft squeeze. She did not know what else to do. First her mother, then her father and Fanen, and finally Hilfred—they were all gone. Mauvin was slipping away as well. The boy who loved his sword more than Wintertide presents, sweet chocolate cake, or swimming on a hot day refused to touch it anymore. The eldest son of Count Pickering, who had once challenged the sun to a duel because it had rained on the day of a hunt, spent his days watching ducks.

Because we cannot discover God's throne in the sky with a radiotelescope or establish (for certain) that a beloved father or mother is still about in a more or less corporeal form, people assume that such ideas are "not true." I would rather say that they are not "true" enough, for these are conceptions of a kind that have accompanied human life from prehistoric times, and that still break through into consciousness at any provocation. Modern man may assert that he can dispose with them, and he may bolster his opinion by insisting that there is no scientific evidence of their truth. Or he may even regret the loss of his convictions. But since we are dealing with invisible and unknowable things (for God is beyond human understanding, and there is no means of proving immortality), why should we bother about evidence? Even if we did not know by reason our need for salt in our food, we should nonetheless profit from its use. We might argue that the use of salt is a mere illusion of taste or a superstition; but it would still contribute to our well-being. Why, then, should we deprive ourselves of views that would prove helpful in crises and would give a meaning to our existence? And how do we know that such ideas are not true? Many people would agree with me if I stated flatly that such ideas are probably illusions. What they fail to realize is that the denial is as impossible to "prove" as the assertion of religious belief. We are entirely free to choose which point of view we take; it will in any case be an arbitrary decision. There is, however, a strong empirical reason why we should cultivate thoughts that can never be proved. It is that they are known to be useful. Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe. He can stand the most incredible hardships when he is convinced that they make sense; he is crushed when, on top of all his misfortunes, he has to admit that he is taking part in a "tale told by an idiot." It is the role of religious symbols to give a meaning to the life of man. The Pueblo Indians believe that they are the sons of Father Sun, and this belief endows their life with a perspective (and a goal) that goes far beyond their limited existence. It gives them ample space for the unfolding of personality and permits them a full life as complete persons. Their plight is infinitely more satisfactory than that of a man in our own civilization who knows that he is (and will remain) nothing more than an underdog with no inner meaning to his life.

Although signs may be found in everything that comes to us, as though a river at our doorstep carried these messages on its surface, the Quran (like other sacred books) speaks in terms of empirical experience, since it is intended to endure through the ages and cannot bind itself to the ‘scientific’ theories of any particular time. Its images are the phenomena of nature as they appear to us in our experience — the rising and setting of the sun, the domed sky above and the mountains, which are like weights set upon the earth. Scientific observations change according to the preconceptions of the observer and the instruments at his disposal, and the speculations which blinkered human minds construct on the basis of these observations change no less swiftly. But man’s experience of the visual universe does not change. The sun ‘rises’ for me today as it ‘rose’ for the man of ten thousand years ago.

They were pragmatic about women who ‘fell’ to an enemy, unlike their contemporaries, the Rajputs, who invested so heavily in their women’s sexual chastity that death, through sati, was preferred to ‘loss of honour’ to an enemy.

Sift the sand of every world and sort the dust of space between them, and you will find not one atom of fear, nor gram of love nor dram of hatred. Yet they are there, unseen and uncertain as the smallest quanta and just as real.

That public men publish falsehoods Is nothing new. That America must accept Like the historical republics corruption and empire Has been known for years. Be angry at the sun for setting If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and tum. They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors, This republic, Europe, Asia. Observe them gesticulating, Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth Hunts in no pack. You are not CatulIus, you know, To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far From Dante’s feet, but even farther from his dirty Political hatredS. Let boys want pleasure, and men Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame, And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped. Yours is not theirs.

The Emperor is dead! So too his right hand - now cold, now severed! But mark these dying shadows, twinned and flowing bloody and beaten, down and away from mortal sight... From sceptre's rule dismissed, from gild candelabra the light now fled, from a hearth ringed in hard jewels seven years this warmth has bled... The Emperor is dead. So too his master'd companion, the rope cut clean. But mark this burgeoning return - faltering dark, the tattered shroud - embracing children in Empire's dying light. Hear now the dirge faint reprised, before the sun's fall, this day spills red on buckled earth, and in obsidian eyes vengeance chimes seven times..." ―Call to Shadow, Felisin (I.i. 1-18)

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the suns themselves begin to die.

and if any conclusion was reached, it was that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.

If you do nothing - or worse, if you help them - they will win. There is no middle ground in this. You must choose. Either the empire or those who fight them.

The Sun Tzu School (which wrote the Art of War) surely never imagined that their antiwar, pro-empire treatise would become known and accepted after the fall of the first empire as a text on military tactics. Likewise, they would have been surprised to see the Ping-fa military metaphor—an inspired teaching device—come to be seen as the message and not the medium.

A little while ago, I stood by the grave of the old Napoleon—a magnificent tomb of gilt and gold, fit almost for a dead deity—and gazed upon the sarcophagus of rare and nameless marble, where rest at last the ashes of that restless man. I leaned over the balustrade and thought about the career of the greatest soldier of the modern world. I saw him walking upon the banks of the Seine, contemplating suicide. I saw him at Toulon—I saw him putting down the mob in the streets of Paris—I saw him at the head of the army of Italy—I saw him crossing the bridge of Lodi with the tri-color in his hand—I saw him in Egypt in the shadows of the pyramids—I saw him conquer the Alps and mingle the eagles of France with the eagles of the crags. I saw him at Marengo—at Ulm and Austerlitz. I saw him in Russia, where the infantry of the snow and the cavalry of the wild blast scattered his legions like winter's withered leaves. I saw him at Leipsic in defeat and disaster—driven by a million bayonets back upon Paris—clutched like a wild beast—banished to Elba. I saw him escape and retake an empire by the force of his genius. I saw him upon the frightful field of Waterloo, where Chance and Fate combined to wreck the fortunes of their former king. And I saw him at St. Helena, with his hands crossed behind him, gazing out upon the sad and solemn sea. I thought of the orphans and widows he had made—of the tears that had been shed for his glory, and of the only woman who ever loved him, pushed from his heart by the cold hand of ambition. And I said I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes. I would rather have lived in a hut with a vine growing over the door, and the grapes growing purple in the kisses of the autumn sun. I would rather have been that poor peasant with my loving wife by my side, knitting as the day died out of the sky—with my children upon my knees and their arms about me—I would rather have been that man and gone down to the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust, than to have been that imperial impersonation of force and murder, known as 'Napoleon the Great.

All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,' the other man said to me during our initial meeting. 'Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by — whether it's religious scriptures or makeshift slogans — all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires — show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there —' he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, 'show business, show business, show business.' 'And what about dreams?' I asked, thinking I might have hit upon an exception to his dogmatic view, or at least one that he would accept as such. 'You mean the dreams of the sort we are having at this moment or the ones we have when we're fortunate enough to sleep?

No!” The word was a roar, a plea, and silver and green flashed in her vision. A name. A name clanged through her as he hurled himself in the path of that fist, that moonfire, not just to save those innocents in the city, but to spare her soul from the agony if she destroyed them all— Rowan. And as his face became clear, his tattoo stark in the sun, as that fist full of unimaginable power now opened toward his heart— There was no force in any world that could keep her contained. And Aelin Galathynius remembered her own name as she shattered through the cage that goddess had shoved her into, as she grabbed that goddess by the damned throat and hurled her out, out, out through that gaping hole where she had infiltrated her, and sealed it— Aelin snapped into her body, her power.

A child can accept all kinds of weird-looking creatures and bizarre occurrences in a story because the child understands that stories have different rules that allow for pretty much anything to happen. Adults, on the other hand, struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it’s not real.

That place, called the heliopause, is one definition of the outer boundary of the Empire of the Sun. But the Voyager spacecraft will plunge on, penetrating the heliopause sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century, skimming through the ocean of space, never to enter another solar system, destined to wander through eternity far from the stellar islands and to complete its first circumnavigation of the massive center of the Milky Way a few hundred million years from now. We have embarked on epic voyages.

Jim watched them eat, his eyes fixed on every morsel that entered their mouth. When the oldest of the four soldiers had finished he scraped some burnt rice and fish scales from the side of the cooking pot. A first-class private of some forty years, with slow, careful hands, he beckoned Jim forward and handed him his mess tin. As they smoked their cigarettes the Japanese smiled to themselves, watching Jim devour the shreds of fatty rice. It was his first hot food since he had left he hospital, and the heat and greasy flavour stung his gums. Tears swam in his eyes. The Japanese soldier who had taken pity on Jim, recognising that this small boy was starving, began to laugh good-naturedly, and pulled the rubber plug from his metal water-bottle. Jim drank the clear, chlorine-flavoured liquid, so unlike the stagnant water in the taps of the Columbia Road. He choked, carefully swallowed his vomit, and tittered into his hands, grinning at the Japanese. Soon they were all laughing together, sitting back in the deep grass beside the drained swimming-pool.

A poet, yes, but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's mouth? The seas' ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: it seems history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating. —That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets. —Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt said that.

The Louis XIII style in perfumery, composed of the elements dear to that period - orris-powder, musk, civet and myrtle-water, already known by the name of angel-water - was scarcely adequate to express the cavalierish graces, the rather crude colours of the time which certain sonnets by Saint-Amand have preserved for us. Later on, with the aid of myrrh and frankincense, the potent and austere scents of religion, it became almost possible to render the stately pomp of the age of Louis XIV, the pleonastic artifices of classical oratory, the ample, sustained, wordy style of Bossuet and the other masters of the pulpit. Later still, the blase, sophisticated graces of French society under Louis XV found their interpreters more easily in frangipane and marechale, which offered in a way the very synthesis of the period. And then, after the indifference and incuriosity of the First Empire, which used eau-de-Cologne and rosemary to excess, perfumery followed Victor Hugo and Gautier and went for inspiration to the lands of the sun; it composed its own Oriental verses, its own highly spiced salaams, discovered intonations and audacious antitheses, sorted out and revived forgotten nuances which it complicated, subtilized and paired off, and in short resolutely repudiated the voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by its Malesherbes, its Boileaus, its Andrieux, its Baour-Lormians, the vulgar distillers of its poems.

This was one of those odd thoughts that came out of the blue and struck me as both clever and logical. Hot chocolate wouldn’t be something desert people would naturally gravitate toward. (There are cold deserts, of course, but with two suns I always assumed Tatooine is mostly pretty warm. Now, of course, the Star Wars Essential Atlas and other official material backs up that assumption.) I also caught way more grief for this than I ever expected. Quite a few people took me to task for putting an Earth-based drink into the Star Wars universe. Of course, those same people apparently weren’t bothered by the Millennium Falcon, or lightsabers. It was, though, a reminder that you never know what word or image might jolt someone out of their suspension of disbelief. Anyway, why would anyone want to live in that Galaxy Far, Far Away if they don’t have chocolate? Inconceivable …

One of the special forces asked Skippy whether we could see the Sun from there, and Skippy enhanced the image in our helmet visors, so we could see the faint light of our home star. I remember Skippy reminding us that the light we were seeing then left the sun eighteen hundred years ago. The Roman Empire ruled the Mediterranean back then. Under that perspective, the authority of Earth begins to seem thin after we pass through a couple wormholes.

QUALITIES There is a sun-star rising outside form. I am lost in that other. It's sweet not to look at two worlds, to melt in meaning as honey melts in milk. No one tires of following the soul. I don't recall now what happens on the manifest plane. I stroll with those I have always wanted to know, fresh and graceful as a water lily, or a rose. The body is a boat; I am waves swaying against it. Whenever it anchors somewhere, I smash it loose, or smash it to pieces. If I get lazy and cold, flames come from my ocean and surround me. I laugh inside them like gold purifying itself. A certain melody makes the snake put his head down on a line in the dirt....Here is my head, brother: What next! Weary of form, I come into qualities. Each says, "I am a blue-green sea. Dive into me!" I am Alexander at the outermost extension of empire, turning all my armies in toward the meaning of armies, Shams.

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658

For a people who honored the ascent and descent of the sun, marking the first and last glimpse of its burning orb with quiet gratitude to their Creator, this time farthest from its presence was meant for being safe and asleep with their loved ones, a fire altar burning to keep the demons out. But Dara had no loved ones and was a demon himself, so here he was.

Dr. Ransome marked the exercises in the algebra textbook and gave him two strips of rice-paper bandage on which to solve the simultaneous equations. As he stood up, Dr. Ransome removed the three tomatoes from Jim's pocket. He laid them on the table by the wax tray. 'Did they come from the hospital garden?' 'Yes.' Jim gazed back frankly at Dr. Ransome. Recently he had begun to see him with a more adult eye. The long years of imprisonment, the constant disputes with the Japanese had made this young physician seem middle-aged. Dr. Ransome was often unsure of himself, as he was of Jim's theft. 'I have to give Basie something whenever I see him.' 'I know. It's a good thing that you're friends with Basie. He's a survivor, though survivors can be dangerous. Wars exist for people like Basie.' Dr. Ransome placed the tomatoes in Jim's hand. 'I want you to eat them, Jim. I'll get you something for Basie.

Get the hell out of—” Aelin let out a low whistle. “Allow me to introduce to you, Captain Rolfe, the incomparable, the beautiful, and the absolutely and all-around flawless Queen of Terrasen.” Dorian’s brows creased. But footsteps sounded, and then—The males shifted as Aelin Galathynius indeed strode into the room, clad in a dark green tunic of equal wear and dirt, her golden hair unbound, her turquoise-and-gold eyes laughing as she strode past a slack-jawed Rolfe and perched on the arm of Aelin’s chair. Dorian couldn’t tell—without a Fae’s sense of smell, he couldn’t tell. “What—what devilry is this,” Rolfe hissed, yielding a single step. Aelin and Aelin looked at each other. The one in black grinned up at the newcomer. “Oh, you are gorgeous, aren’t you?” The one in green smiled, but for all its delight, all its wicked mischief … It was a softer smile, made with a mouth that was perhaps less used to snarling and teeth-baring and getting away with saying hideous, swaggering things. Lysandra, then. The two queens faced Rolfe. “Aelin Galathynius had no twin,” he growled, a hand on his sword. Aelin in black—the true Aelin, who had been among them all along—rolled her eyes. “Ugh, Rolfe. You ruin my fun. Of course I don’t have a twin.” She jerked her chin at Lysandra, and the shifter’s flesh glowed and melted, hair becoming a heavy, straight fall of dark tresses, her skin sun-kissed, her uptilted eyes a striking green.

Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir to a history of disappointment and betrayal, violence, and loss. Centuries of loss, empires of disappointment. All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life--feeding on to it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream--struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations.

And in the east, slipping over the mountains like molten gold, the sun began to rise. A hundred years she'd had with Asterin. She'd always thought they'd have a hundred more. Manon said softly to Sorrel, "Turn her around. My Second shall see the dawn one last time." Sorrel obediently stepped forward, pivoting Asterin to face the High Witches, the crowd by the rail--and the rare sunrise piercing through Morath's gloom. Blood stack through the back of her Second's leathers. And yet Asterin knelt, shoulders square and head high, as she looked not at the dawn--but at Manon herself while she stalked around her Second to take a place few feet before the Matrons.

The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushioned by generous pensions supplied by Indian taxpayers. The

Why are you here?” “Oh— I came to tell the chieftain we’re going to die.” The girl said it quickly and with the same casual indifference as if she were announcing that the sun sets in the evening. Persephone narrowed her eyes. “Excuse me? What did you say? Who’s going to die?” “All of us.” “All of whom?” “Us.” The girl looked puzzled, but this time Persephone wasn’t certain if it was the tattoos or not. “You and I?” Suri sighed. “Yes— you, me, the funny man with the horn at the gate, everyone.

There are empires upon which the sun will never set, railways that cross continents, rivers of wealth that will never run dry, machines that never grow tired. It’s a system too vast and ravenous to ever be dismantled, like a deity or an engine, which swallows men and women whole and belches black smoke into the sky. Its name is Modernity, I am told, and it carries Progress and Prosperity in its coal-fired belly—but I see only rigidity, repression, a chilling resistance to change. I believe I already know what happens to a world without doors.

And under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and its Reuter's agency, the real life of man goes on concerned with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song, totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car civilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming space, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars suburban.

Every night in Shanghai those Chinese too poor to pay for the burial of their relatives would launch the bodies from the funeral piers at Nantao, decking the coffins with paper flowers. Carried away on the tide, they came back on the next, returning to the waterfront of Shanghai with all the other debris abandoned by the city. Meadows of paper flowers drifted on running tide and clumped in miniature floating gardens around the old men and women, the young mothers and small children, whose swollen bodies seemed to have been fed during the night by the patient Yangtze.

The Spanish and Portuguese empires proclaimed that it was not riches they sought in the Indies and America, but converts to the true faith. The sun never set on the British mission to spread the twin gospels of liberalism and free trade. The Soviets felt duty-bound to facilitate the inexorable historical march from capitalism towards the utopian dictatorship of the proletariat. Many Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s.

What then shall be said of those scholars of our time, blind to all great issues, and without any appreciation of relative values, who can only bark out their stale formulas about “virtue” and “civilization,” condemning the use of military weapons? They will surely bring our country to impotence and dishonor and the loss of her rightful heritage; or, at the very least, they will bring about invasion and rebellion, sacrifice of territory and general enfeeblement. Yet they obstinately refuse to modify the position they have taken up. The truth is that, just as in the family the teacher must not spare the rod, and punishments cannot be dispensed with in the State, so military chastisement can never be allowed to fall into abeyance in the Empire. All one can say is that this power will be exercised wisely by some, foolishly by others, and that among those who bear arms some will be loyal and others rebellious.

What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars—even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness

La Dicha He who embraces a woman is Adam. The woman is Eve. Everything happens for the first time. I have seen a white thing in the sky. They tell me it's the moon, but what can I do with a word and a mythology. The trees frighten me a bit. They are so beautiful. The calm animals come near for me to tell them their names. The books in the library have no letters. When I open them, they come up. When I peruse the atlas I project the shape of Sumatra. He who lights a match in the dark is inventing fire. In the mirror there's someone else lurking. He who looks at the sea sees England. He who utters a verse by Liliencron has entered the battle. I have dreamed Carthage and the legions that devastated Carthage. I have dreamed the sword and the scales. Praised be the love in which there is no possessor or possessed, but the two surrender themselves. Praised be the nightmare, which reveals to us that we can create hell. He who comes down to a river comes down to the Ganges. He who watches a sand clock sees the dissolution of an empire. He who plays with a knife foretells the death of Caesar. He who sleeps is all men. In the desert I saw the young Sphinx, that they just finished carving. There's nothing old under the sun. Everything happens for the first time, but in an eternal fashion. He who reads my words is inventing them.

Muhammad Iqbal, who had spent three rewarding years as a student in Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century, now wrote of it in the satirical tradition of the Illahabadi: The West develops wonderful new skills In this as in so many other fields Its submarines are crocodiles Its bombers rain destruction from the skies Its gases so obscure the sky They blind the sun’s world-seeing eye Dispatch this old fool to the West To learn the art of killing fast- and best On his previous trips to the West, Liang, like Tagore and Iqbal, had been a qualified admirer. During his longest sojourn there, he began to develop grave doubts about the civilization that had so blithely thrown away the fruits of progress and rationalism and sunk into barbarism. The ‘materialist’ West had managed to subdue nature through science and technology and created a Darwinian universe of conflict between individuals, classes and nations. But to what effect? Its materialistic people, constantly desiring ever-new things and constantly being frustrated, were worn out by war, were afflicted with insecurity, and were as far from happiness as ever.

Wynter's Pass was a picturesque region in the north of Vohlfhein, where the Bleak Hills eventually collapsed into the Frozen Sea. From the back of Mr. Buckles, who had been on a slow trot since sunrise, Monch watched the light glisten off of the frozen branches of the evergreens. As the sun warmed the frozen ground, sending the evening's frost into retreat, Monch absorbed the splendor of it all and wondered how expensive the local real estate must be around here. He then contemplated attempting to find an agent that would represent his interests well. "This land is such a spectacular wonder," the Lion of Ahriman declared. "It would be very much sought after if they could just do something about the bears, the White Orts, the wolves, the bloodthirsty cannibals, the snow manapés, the frost wizards, the northern bandit gangs, the dire lynxes, the similarly sounding but not related pygmy bloodthirsty cannibals, the demon possessed yaks, the dead-soul animated trees, the..." Monch paused for a moment. "It just occurred to me that this land is really not safe at all. It seems almost everything in it wants to kill me," the Templar admitted.

Just as summer-killed meat draws flies, so the court draws spurious sages, philosophists, and acosmists who remain there as long as their purses and their wits will maintain them, in the hope (at first) of an appointment from the Autarch and (later) of obtaining a tutorial position in some exalted family. At sixteen or so, Thecla was attracted, as I think young women often are, to their lectures on theogony, thodicy, and the like, and I recall one particularly in which a phoebad put forward as an ultimate truth the ancient sophistry of the existence of three Adonai, that of the city (or of the people), that of the poets, and that of the philosophers. Her reasoning was that since the beginning of human consciousness (if such a beginning ever was) there have been vast numbers of persons in the three categories who have endeavored to pierce the secret of the divine. If it does not exist, they should have discovered that long before; if it does, it is not possible that Truth itself should mislead them. Yet the beliefs of the populace, the insights of the rhapsodists, and the theories of the metaphysicians have so far diverged that few of them can so much as comprehend what the others say, and someone who knew nothing of any of their ideas might well believe there was no connection at all between them. May it not be, she asked (and even now I am not certain I can answer), that instead of traveling, as has always been supposed, down three roads to the same destination, they are actually traveling toward three quite different ones? After all, when in common life we behold three roads issuing from the same crossing, we do not assume they all proceed toward the same goal. I found (and find) this suggestion as rational as it is repellent, and it represents for me all that monomaniacal fabric of argument, so tightly woven that not even the tiniest objection or spark of light can escape its net, in which human minds become enmeshed whenever the subject is one in which no appeal to fact is possible. As a fact the Claw was thus an incommensurable. No quantity of money, no piling up of archipelagoes or empires could approach it in value any more than the indefinite multiplication of horizontal distance could be made to equal vertical distance. If it was, as I believed, a thing from outside the universe, then its light, which I had seen shine faintly so often, and a few times brightly, was in some sense the only light we had. If it were destroyed, we were left fumbling in the dark.

. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must’ve passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . . But anyway so Bickle said, “Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?” I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich. He said, “You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there’s some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there’d have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That’s a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn’t bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn’t pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you’d start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you’d notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you’d start to wonder if somehow it didn’t get restocked while you slept. But you’d realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you’d keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you’d begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn’t explain it, you’d still need it. And you’d assume that you simply didn’t understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn’t place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You’d place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you’d come to realize you’d exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You’d worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You’d make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you’d start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you’d grow so frustrated you’d push it off this cliff.” “Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?” I asked. After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, “That’s the neocortex talking again.