Fatal Throne Quotes

By changing a life, just one life, you -can- change the world. It is the only way anyone ever has. [Anna of Cleves]

Oh, how I prefer the honest violence of men, who will bash in another man's skull and be done, to the thousand shallow cuts of women's malice.

There was a second scream then, from the mountains. From the Blueblood Matron, screaming for her daughter as she plummeted down to the rocks below. The other Bluebloods whirled, but they were too far away, their wyverns too slow to stop that fatal plunge. But Abraxos was not. And Manon didn't know if she gave the command or thought it, but that scream, that mother's scream she'd never heard before, made her lean in. Abraxos dove, a shooting star with his glistening wings. They dove and dove, for the broken wyvern and the still-living witch upon it.

...One thing I have noticed, child, is that tyrants are the grandest romantics. They can burn a heretic alive once day, and compose a love sonnet the next.

Life deals the cards, but it is up to us how we play them. [Maria of Jülich-Berg, mother of Anna of Cleves]

But we glared into each other's eyes like men who have ruined each other already, and who only wait to make the full disaster known

I am my head and my heart, all that I know, all that I love, everything I hope for. I am the blue waters of the Rhine, sparkling in the sun.

Words hold such weight and consequence. I have not always been mindful of my tongue, and it has cost me. For if given the choice, people will believe the worst of you, not the best.

I was a woman alone, yet never lonely. I was enough for myself. Nay, more than enough; I was a feast. Had Henry known, I would surely have gone to the block. To be happy without him was the highest of treasons. [Anna of Cleves]

Up in the high palace, my mother is weeping. She storms and rages. Tears at her hair. She died thus, driven insane by war and the loss of her ancestral lands. ... I embrace her. "Mother, why do you rage so?" "The doings of men have driven me mad. Everyone told me I must accept what I cannot change. But I wished to change what I cannot accept, and that is where the trouble starts." ... "Mother, do not cry over Wilhelm," I plead, taking her cold hands in mine. "He is not worth it." "Ah, Anna," she says sorrowfully. "You think I'm crying because I had such a foolish son and everyone knew it. But I'm not. I'm crying because I had such a clever daughter and no one did." [Anna of Cleves]

The Hindus teach that the Heaven World is more dangerous for the soul than the Hell World, since it is more deceptive and conduces to the fatal error of overconfidence and assumption of immunity. Like a fighter the soul must be constantly in training lest it grow soft on an ephemeral throne. So the splendor of the palace, the constant parades, the state barges, the gold and lapis lazuli, the chariots and bowmen, eat away one's awareness of the ultimate reality of conflict...

I could bear it [the shame] because I knew the truth, child," I say. "There was one of us in that marriage who was old, fat, and smelly, and it wasn't me." "The King was cruel to speak thus," Alice says, but in a low voice. As if Henry, dead these past ten years, might somehow hear her. "He was, yes," I say. "But I think mostly he was afraid." Alice is sceptical. "Kings are afraid of nothing," she says. "This King was afraid. I know it, for I'm the one who made him so. I made a mistake, child, a grave one." "What was it?" "I made my face a mirror when it should've been a mask, and what the King saw there terrified him. He hated me for it, and never, ever forgave me." [Anna of Cleves]

We shall some day realize, perhaps too late, the effects produced by the diminution of paternal authority. That authority, which formerly ceased only at the death of the father, was the sole human tribunal before which domestic crimes could be arraigned; kings themselves, on special occasions, took part in executing its judgments. However good and tender a mother may be, she cannot fulfil the function of the patriarchal royalty any more than a woman can take the place of a king upon the throne. Perhaps I have never drawn a picture that shows more plainly how essential to European society is the indissoluble marriage bond, how fatal the results of feminine weakness, how great the dangers arising from selfish interests when indulged without restraint

They sighed: "This leadeth to captivity-- Perchance destruction, ending dark and dire. Yet must we yield to human liberty Its own, e'en though a brand from freedom's fire Kindle for freedom's self the fatal pyre." So saying, they anointed one their king Who craved the crown, by patriot son and sire Put by in pure denial, lest it bring First care, then crime, and waken woes then slumbering. For though a king see duty's pathway plain, And walk therein, as he who now arose; What monarch from misrule can all refrain, When privilege lifts power o'er friends and foes? Rare is the reign untarnished to the close, And rarer still the blameless dynasty. Ofttimes as princes the unkingliest pose, Because, forsooth, they come of some tall tree, Whose root and trunk were sound, while branches blasted be. True kingliness--what else proves man a king? A slave, though throned and sceptered, bides a slave; Nor pride, nor pelf, nor all that power may bring, Can make the serf a sovereign, or yet save The dust of either from the common grave. Royal the soul must be, or comes to end All royalty. Spirit, then blood, God gave; And each at last its separate way doth wend Home to the parent source, to meet no more, nor blend.

Tolkien’s work lies partly in the fact that contemporary events seemed to conform—tragically—to the pattern of human life expressed in its pages.52 In this, Tolkien understood the problem not merely as the abuse of power: it was the temptation to pride, which the possession of power instigated and elevated into the fatal sin. “It was part of the essential deceit of the Ring,” he explained, “to fill minds with imaginations of supreme power.”53 The possession of such power inevitably placed the unconstrained Self on the throne of the universe.

The omnipotence of God makes no sense if it requires the all-causingness of God. Good people quit God altogether at this point, and throw out the baby with the bath, perhaps because they last looked into God in their childhoods, and have not changed their views of divinity since. It is not the tooth fairy. In fact, even Aquinas dissolved the fatal problem of natural, physical evil by tinkering with God’s omnipotence. Again, Paul writes to the Christians in Rome: “In all things God works for the good of those who love him.” When was that? I missed it. In China, in Israel, in the Yemen, in the Ecuadoran Andes and the Amazon basin, in Greenland, Iceland, and Baffin Island, in Europe, on the shore of the Beaufort Sea inside the Arctic Circle, and in Costa Rica, in the Marquesas Islands and the Tuamotus, and in the United States, I have seen the rich sit secure on their thrones and send the hungry away empty. If God’s escape clause is that he gives only spiritual things, then we might hope that the poor and suffering are rich in spiritual gifts, as some certainly are, but as some of the comfortable are too. Maybe “all your actions show your wisdom and love” means that the precious few things we know that God did, and does, are in fact unambiguous in wisdom and love, and all other events derive not from God but only from blind chance, just as they seem to. What, then, of the bird-headed dwarfs? It need not craze us, I think, to know we are evolving, like other living forms, according to physical processes. Statistical probability describes the mechanism of evolution—chance operating on large numbers— That is, evolution’s “every success is necessarily paid for by a large percentage of failures.” In order to live at all, we pay “a mysterious tribute of tears, blood, and sin.

Now, Kansa was left all alone, Sri Krishna pulled Kansa from the throne where he was sitting and slapped him so hard that he fell down on the ground. The injury proved to be fatal and as a result Kansa died.

God has a strong reason for hating pride so much; it is the sin that led to the fall of humanity, and it was the fatal flaw of the tempter who brought about such destruction. Pride is what prompted Lucifer to say in his heart: I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, and I will sit on the mount of assembly in the recesses of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High. (Isa. 14:13–14) God’s grace is reserved for the humble.

On Friday, October 14, 1091, a huge tornado struck the city of London, England, destroying the original wooden London Bridge and several nearby buildings. Four 26 ft.-long rafters were torn from the roof of a local church and driven into the ground so forcefully that only 4 ft. of them remained visible. Remarkably, there were only two reported fatalities.

The enemy perhaps may challenge my sex for that I am a woman - so may I likewise challenge them, for they are but men.

Life deals you the cards. but it is up to us how we play them

Do not wish for beauty, Alice. Wish for cleverness instead. Wish for a strong back and a strong will. They will do you more good than red lips and dimpels.

Women help one another survive much in this world

when the truth is not as dramatic as the rumour, it gets altered.

Certain it is that the boys disappeared. Whatever happened to them, Richard’s fatal mistake lay in failing to realize that their disappearance would be used by the Morton-Beaufort-Tudor axis as an opportunity to manoeuvre the unlikely Henry Tudor to centre stage as a challenger for the throne. Regrettably, Richard appears not to have taken sufficient regard of this threat. Thus he would not have foreseen that removing them from view, even if done for the most benign of reasons, would play right into the hands of his opponents.

The demon inside his father had done that, too—snapped Chaol’s spine. The man fighting inside his father had kept the blow from being fatal.

How does a figure like Richard III or Macbeth ascend to the throne? Such a disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity. His plays probe the psychological mechanisms that lead a nation to abandon its ideals and even its self-interest. Why would anyone, he asked himself, be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth? Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness, or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers?

years

Poison is for weaklings, they say. The English poet Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650) may have been the first to coin the term “coward's weapon,” but the opinion has not dissipated in the centuries since; even a character in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones recently sniped that poison was a gutless way to kill. Poison is sneaky, it’s slow, and you can poison someone without spilling a drop of their blood or awkwardly making eye contact with them midimpalement. As such, it doesn’t get a lot of cred for being scary. Poisoners simply don’t terrify people the way, say, disembowlers do. But that’s unfair, because poisoning requires advance planning and the stomach for a drawn-out death scene. You need to look into your victim’s trusting eyes day after day as you slowly snuff out their life. You have to play the role of nurse or parent or lover while you sustain your murderous intent at a pitch that would be unbearable for many of those who’ve shot a gun or swung a sword. You’ve got to mop up your victim’s vomit and act sympathetic when they beg for water. While they scream that their insides are on fire, you must steel yourself against the dreadful sight of encroaching death and give them another sip of the fatal drink. A coward’s weapon? Not so much. Poison is the weapon of the emotionless, the sociopathic, and the truly cruel.

I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that. Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost. May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory

I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that. Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost. May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory

​Few would dispute that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europe, and especially Great Britain, dominated the world culturally, politically and economically. Britain was the crucible of the Industrial Revolution and its military forces secured the colonies as surely as the English language invaded their cultures. When Queen Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837, she presided over the largest empire in history: the empire on which the sun never set. If you had gone to her court in 1870 and suggested that this empire would be over within a generation, you would have been laughed out of the building. But it was true. By the end of World War I in 1918, the empire was fatally wounded and, by the time I was born in 1950, it was a memory. Culturally, politically and economically, the twentieth century was dominated by the United States, as surely as Europe had dominated the nineteenth. Whether it will dominate the twenty-first century remains to be seen. As award-winning US scientist Jared Diamond has shown, empires tend to collapse rather than fade away.4 Think of the Soviet Union and its rapid dissolution in the 1980s and 1990s.