Rhythms Of War Quotes

This is life, and I will not lie by saying every day will be sunshine. But there will be sunshine again, and that is a very different thing to say. That is truth.

Journey before destination, you bastard.

It will,” Wit said, “but then it will get better. Then it will get worse again. Then better. This is life, and I will not lie by saying every day will be sunshine. But there will be sunshine again, and that is a very different thing to say. That is truth. I promise you, Kaladin: You will be warm again.

Our weakness doesn’t make us weak. Our weakness makes us strong. For we had to carry it all these years.

Some people charged toward the goal, running for all they had. Others stumbled. But it wasn't the speed that mattered. It was the direction they were going.

No one ever accomplished anything by being content with who they were, Shallan,” Adolin said. “We accomplish great things by reaching toward who we could become.” “As long as it’s what you want to become. Not what someone else thinks you should become.

Kaladin’s anxiety began to subside, and he pushed through the worst of the darkness. He always emerged on the other side. Why was that so difficult to remember while in the middle of it?

You just want to stop existing,” Kaladin said. “You don’t want to actually kill yourself, not on most days. But you figure it sure would be convenient if you weren’t around anymore.

Who do you think is stronger?” Adolin asked. “The man who has walked easily his entire life, or the man with no legs? The man who must pull himself by his arms?

Heroism is a myth you tell idealistic young people—specifically when you want them to go bleed for you.

You don't have to smile. You don't have to talk. But if you're going to be miserable, you might as well do it with friends.

That’s because Wit is an asshole,

My turn now. The story of one of my insanities. For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes-- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable. What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes. I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic. I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator. I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

If we can choose, we can change. If we can't change, then choice means nothing. I'm glad I feel this way, to remind me that I haven't always felt the same. Been the same.

Why do we fight, Kal? Why do we keep going?” “I don’t know,” Kaladin whispered. “I’ve forgotten.” “It’s so we can be with each other.” “They all die, Tien. Everyone dies.” “So they do, don’t they?” “That means it doesn’t matter,” Kaladin said. “None of it matters.” “See, that’s the wrong way of looking at it.” Tien held him tighter. “Since we all go to the same place in the end, the moments we spent with each other are the only things that do matter. The times we helped each other.

DON'T SPOIL STORIES!

I know what you are,” Shallan whispered. “You’re the blankness upon my memories. The part of me that looks away. The part of my mind that protects me from my past.” “Of course I am,” Veil said. “I’m your veil, Shallan.

Adolin is right,” Veil said. “He’s always been right about you. Tell me. Who is the strongest of mind? The woman whose emotions are always on her side? Or the woman whose own thoughts betray her? You have fought this fight every day of your life, Shallan. And you are not weak.

I don’t struggle with feelings of insecurity any longer.” “Good.” “I’d say I’m pretty good at them.

You're always willing to give others more charity than you extend yourself.

His entire life had been a futile effort to stop a storm by yelling at it. The storm didn't care.

I’m not strong enough,” Kaladin whispered. “You’re strong enough for me.” “I’m not good enough.” “You’re good enough for me.” “I wasn’t there.” Tien smiled. “You are here for me, Kal. You’re here for all of us.

WATCH, the Rider said. YOU WANTED TO KNOW WHAT WAS BEYOND THE NEXT HILL. SEE THEM ALL.

We need both heart and mind," Lirin said. "The heart might provide the purpose, but the head provides the method, the path. Passion is nothing without a plan. Wanting something doesn't make it happen.

You need someone to talk to, Noril, when the darkness is strong. Someone to remind you the world hasn’t always been this way; that it won’t always be this way.

History is like that, always gobbling up the present.

Fine,” Navani said. “I hope when you die—knowing your homeland is doomed, your families enslaved, your queen executed—you feel satisfied knowing that at least you maintained a slight market advantage.

Radiant,” he said. “How? How do you still fight?” “The same way you do,” Kaladin said. “One day at a time, always taking the next step.

Few men have the wisdom to realize when they need help. Fewer still have the strength to go get it.

Was he happy? He wasn’t sad. For now, he’d accept “not sad.

I am an artist,” Wit said. “I should thank you not to demean me by insisting my art must be trying to accomplish something. In fact, you shouldn’t enjoy art. You should simply admit that it exists, then move on. Anything else is patronizing.

Aladar's axehounds had puppies. I had no idea how much I needed to see puppies until I flew by them this morning. They are the grossest things on the planet, Kaladin. They're somehow so gross that they're cute. So cute I could have died! Except I can't, because I'm an eternal sliver of God himself, and we have standards about things like that.

No army, no matter how clean its reputation, walked away from war untainted. And no leader, no matter how noble, could help but sink into the crem when he stepped into the game of conquest.

When good men disobeyed, it was time to look at your orders.

I know how you feel. Dark, like there's never been light in the world. Like everything in you is a void, and you wish you could just feel something. Anything. Pain would at least tell you you're alive. Instead you feel nothing. And you wonder, how can a man breathe, but already be dead?

Extinction is the natural escalation of this war,” Leshwi whispered. “If you forget why you are fighting, then victory itself becomes the goal.

But why do you care? What does it matter?" "You're my only Bridgeboy," Adolin said with a grin. "Where would I get another?

Honor is not dead so long as he lives in the hearts of men!

Run. Flee. I'll chase you. I will never stop. I am eternal. I am the storm.

Our weakness doesn't make us weak. Our weakness makes us strong, for we've had to carry it all these years.

Do try to focus.” “Well, I do try. I simply fail.

Strength before weakness. He was coming to understand that part of his first oath. He had discovered weakness in himself, but that wasn't something to be ashamed of. Because of that weakness, he could help in ways nobody could.

Yet the misery did lessen around others, and it required Kaladin to keep up a semblance. To pretend. It might be a front, but he'd found that sometimes the front worked even on himself.

It was a nice dream, wasn't it, Syl?" he asked. "That we could escape? Find peace at long last?" "Such a wonderful dream," she whispered.

Deal with your own stupid planet, you idiot. Don’t make me come over there and slap you around again.

What I wanted was a connection, a shared heartbeat that kept rhythm across oceans and worlds. Not some alliance cobbled out of war. I didn’t want the prince from the folktales or some milk-skinned, honey-eyed youth who said his greetings and proclaimed his love in the same breath. I wanted a love thick with time, as inscrutable as if a lathe had carved it from night and as familiar as the marrow in my bones. I wanted the impossible, which made it that much easier to push out of my mind.

I know. I’m sorry.” Adolin grimaced. “I’m not explaining it well. I just … I don’t think Shallan is as weak as you say. Weakness doesn’t make someone weak, you see. It’s the opposite.

For the men chatting together softly, the change was in being shown sunlight again. In being reminded that the darkness DID pass. But perhaps most important, the change was in not merely knowing that you weren't alone — but in FEELING it. Realizing that no matter how isolated you thought you were, no matter how often your brain told you terrible things, there WERE others who understood.

That night, it rained on the other dogs, who slept outside in the cold barn, which leaked. But the little dog snuggled into a warm bed beside the fire, hugged by the farmer’s children, his belly full. And as he did, the dog sadly thought to himself, ‘I could not become a dragon. I am an utter and complete failure.’ The end.

Who is a better swimmer?” Veil whispered. “It’s the sailor who has swum his entire life, even if he encounters rough seas that challenge him. Who is the stronger man? It is the man who must pull himself by his arms.

The chanting went on, the musicians giving in to the rhythm of their own being, finding healing in touching that rhythm, and healing in chanting about death, the only real god they knew.

Love can’t change the realities of our situation.” “No, but it can change people.

I accept that there will be those I cannot protect.

You should have been the surgeon Adolin," Kaladin said. "Not me. You care about people." "Don't be silly," Adolin said, pulling open the door as he gestured at Kaladin's work clothing. "I could never dress like that." He left Kaladin with a wink.

Science was all about lines, about imposing order on chaos. Navani reveled in her careful preparations, without anyone to tease her for keeping her charts so neat or for refusing to skip any steps.

I doubt any dragon ever had it so good anyway.

What did you do the moment you found out?" Mraize said. "Cursed your name.

If you spend your life knocking people down, you eventually find they won't stand up for you.

Maybe I'm my own brand of wrong.

there was a God, if the Almighty was still out there somewhere, had he created Moash? Why? Why bring such a thing into the world?

When we live without listening to the timing of things, when we live and work in twenty-four-hour shifts without rest – we are on war time, mobilized for battle. Yes, we are strong and capable people, we can work without stopping, faster and faster, electric lights making artificial day so the whole machine can labor without ceasing. But remember: No living thing lives like this. There are greater rhythms, seasons and hormonal cycles and sunsets and moonrises and great movements of seas and stars. We are part of the creation story, subject to all its laws and rhythms.

Sense, Odium. The only kind I have is nonsense. Well, and some cents, but cents are nonsense here too—so we can ignore them. Scents are mine aplenty, and you never cared for the ones I present. So instead, the sense that matters is the sense Dalinar sensibly sent you.

One must find rhythms others’ ears don’t hear.

War is the last option of the state that has failed,

More wars are lost to lack of information than are lost to lack of courage.

I could not become a dragon. I am an utter and complete failure.

and he pushed through the worst of the darkness. He always emerged on the other side. Why was that so difficult to remember while in the middle of it?

You were supposed to be different. You-" "Why?" Dalinar asked, standing calmly. "Why what?" Kaladin snapped. "Why am I different?" "Because you don't throw us away!" Kaladin shouted. "Because you... because..." Because you care about your men.

This is life, and I will not lie to you saying every day will be sunshine. But there will be sunshine again, and that's a very different thing to say. That is truth. I promise you, Kaladin: you will be warm again.

Wit dropped his bloody handkerchief before Ruthar. “How remarkable,” he said. “If you spend your life knocking people down, you eventually find they won’t stand up for you. There’s poetry in that, don’t you think, you storming personification of a cancerous anal discharge?

I'm sorry, Father," Kaladin said. "Sorry? For... for what?" "I thought your way might be correct," Kaladin said. "And that I'd been wrong. But I don't think it's that simple. I think we're both correct. For us.

Never underestimate the simple intimidating force of a man who won't back down.

It is his ultimate lie, Son of Honor. The lie that says you have no choice. The lie that there is no more journey worth taking.

That which we allow to exist, to flourish freely according to its own rhythms, is superior to anything our little hands create.

Adolin might claim he was a different from his father, but in fact they were two shades of the same paint. Often, two similar colors clashed worse than wildly different ones would.

Do not deny your own talents simply because you envy another's.

Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts – between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love. History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.

But sir, do you know why I get up each day?” Lirin shook his head. “It’s hard sometimes,” Noril said, stirring. “Coming awake means leaving the nothingness, you know? Remembering the pain. But then I think, ‘Well, he gets up.’” “You mean Kaladin?” Lirin asked. “Yes, sir,” Noril said. “He’s got the emptiness, bad as I do. I can see it in him. We all can. But he gets up anyway. We’re trapped in here, and we all want to do something to help. We can’t, but somehow he can. “And you know, I’ve listened to ardents talk. I’ve been poked and prodded. I’ve been stuck in the dark. None of that worked as well as knowing this one thing, sir. He still gets up. He still fights. So I figure … I figure I can too.” (less)

There was always an excuse for why Kaladin needed the spear again, wasn't there? This was what he'd been afraid of. This was what made him tremble. The worry that he would never be able to put it down.

Still, a fling couldn’t hurt, right?” Veil said. She nodded her chin toward one of the passing barmaids, a tall young woman with unusually light hair. “What about Hem over there? She’s tall.” “Great. Tall,” Kaladin said. “Because we both measure roughly the same in inches, we’re sure to get along. Think of all the tall-person topics of conversation we could engage in. Like … Hmm…

The baking thing is an actual tradition,” Wit added. “I once visited a place where—if you lose a battle—your mother has to bake the other fellow something tasty. I rather liked those people.” “Pity you didn’t remain with them longer,” Dalinar said. “Ha! Well, I didn’t think it wise to stay around. After all, they were cannibals.

Every form of human conflict may be reduced to precisely the same pattern of mental events. We are all totalitarian despots over our own thoughts, bound to keep our minds in complete control. Control requires security. Security demands war. All war is the macrocosmic residue of neural synapses struggling to maintain their rhythm.

I figure the Blackthorn has studied every military text known to man,” he said. “And we could do worse for a general than the person who likely read ’em to him. Particularly if she’s willing to listen to a little sense. That’s more than I can say for some highlords I’ve followed.

how often has "hope" been the reason someone refuses to move on and accept a realistic attitude? How often has "hope" caused more pain or delayed healing? How often has "hope" prevented someone from standing up and doing what needs to be done, because they cling to a wish for everything to be different?

He didn't like it when people used the word "stupid" for the way he was. People called one another stupid when they made mistakes. Dabbid wasn't a mistake. He could make mistakes. Then he was stupid. But not always. He couldn't think fast like others. But that made him different, not stupid. Stupid was a choice.

That’s stupid. The story is really long. He needs to hear the ending so he’ll know it’s worth listening all the way.” “That’s not how this works,” Wit said. “It needs drama. Suspense. Surprise.” “Surprises are dumb,” she said. “He should be informed if a product is good or not before being asked to commit. Would you like a similar surprise at the market? Oh, you can’t buy a specific food. You have to carry a sack home, cut it open, then find out what you bought. Drama. Suspense!” Wit gave Kaladin a beleaguered look. “I have bonded,” he said, “a literal monster.

Nothing changed, in the aftermath of loss. Songs kept getting written. Books kept getting read. Wars didn't stop....Life renewed itself, over and over, without sympathy. Time surged on in its usual rhythms, those comings and goings, beginnings and ends, sensible progressions that fixed things in place, without a thought to the whistling in the woods on the outskirts of town....

It won’t be like that for me,” Kaladin said. “You told me it would get worse.” “It will,” Wit said, “but then it will get better. Then it will get worse again. Then better. This is life, and I will not lie by saying every day will be sunshine. But there will be sunshine again, and that is a very different thing to say. That is truth. I promise you, Kaladin: You will be warm again.

A group of people in black robes stood around her, each holding a brightly shining diamond broam in one palm. She blinked at the sharp light. Their hoods looked a fair bit more comfortable than her sack. Each robe was embroidered with the Double Eye of the Almighty, and Shallan had a fleeting thought, wondering at the seamstress they’d hired to do all this work. What had they told her? “Yes, we want twenty identical, mysterious robes, sewn with ancient arcane symbols. They’re for … parties.

What I Will by Suheir Hammad I will not dance to your war drum. I will not lend my soul nor my bones to your war drum. I will not dance to your beating. I know that beat. It is lifeless. I know intimately that skin you are hitting. It was alive once hunted stolen stretched. I will not dance to your drummed up war. I will not pop spin break for you. I will not hate for you or even hate you. I will not kill for you. Especially I will not die for you. I will not mourn the dead with murder nor suicide. I will not side with you nor dance to bombs because everyone else is dancing. Everyone can be wrong. Life is a right not collateral or casual. I will not forget where I come from. I will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved near and our chanting will be dancing. Our humming will be drumming. I will not be played. I will not lend my name nor my rhythm to your beat. I will dance and resist and dance and persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than death. Your war drum ain’t louder than this breath.

By asking questions rather than thinking for the audience, we invite them to join us as a partner and think for themselves. If we approach an argument as a war, there will be winners and losers. If we see it more as a dance, we can begin to choreograph a way forward. By considering the strongest version of an opponent’s perspective and limiting our responses to our few best steps, we have a better chance of finding a rhythm.

A voice from the dark called out, "The poets must give us imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster. Peace, not only the absence of war." But peace, like a poem, is not there ahead of itself, can't be imagined before it is made, can't be known except in the words of its making, grammar of justice, syntax of mutual aid. A feeling towards it, dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have until we begin to utter its metaphors, learning them as we speak. A line of peace might appear if we restructured the sentence our lives are making, revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power, questioned our needs, allowed long pauses. . . . A cadence of peace might balance its weight on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence, an energy field more intense than war, might pulse then, stanza by stanza into the world, each act of living one of its words, each word a vibration of light--facets of the forming crystal.

Tien,” Kaladin said. “Why did you do it? You should have stayed safe.” Tien turned to him, then smiled. “They would have been alone. They needed someone to help them feel brave.” “They were slaughtered,” Kaladin said. “So were you.” “So it was good someone was there, to help them not feel so alone as it happened.” “You were terrified. I saw your eyes.” “Of course I was.” Tien looked at him as the charge began, and the enemy advanced up the hillside. “Who wouldn’t be afraid? Doesn’t change that I needed to be here. For them.

Now he reduced his progress to the rhythm of his boots -- he walked across the land until he came to the sea. Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on. In one pan of the scales, his wound, thirst, the blister, tiredness, the heat, the aching in his feet and legs, the Stukas, the distance, the Channel; in the other, I'll wait for you, and the memory of when she had said it, which he had come to treat like a sacred site. Also, the fear of capture. His most sensual memories -- their few minutes in the library, the kiss in Whitehall -- was bleached colorless through overuse. He knew by heart certain passages from her letters, he had revisited their tussle with the vase by the fountain, he remembered the warmth from her arm at the dinner when the twins went missing. These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality. But these heresies died when he read her last letter. He touched his breast pocket. It was a kind of genuflection. Still there. Here was something new on the scales. That he could be cleared had all the simplicity of love. Merely tasting the possibility reminded him of how much had narrowed and died. His taste for life, no less, all the old ambitions and pleasures. The prospect was of rebirth, a triumphant return.

It is spectacular,” his mother said. “Though I’m a little more stunned to hear you referring to Brightness Navani Kholin by her first name. Isn’t she queen of this tower?” Kaladin shrugged. “I’ve grown more informal with them as I’ve gotten to know them.” “He’s lying,” Syl said in a conspiratorial tone from where she sat on Hesina’s shoulder. “He’s always talked like that. Kaladin called King Elhokar by his name for ages before becoming a Radiant.” “Disrespectful of lighteyed authority,” Hesina said, “and generally inclined to do whatever he wants, regardless of social class or traditions. Where in Roshar did he get it?” She glanced at Kaladin’s father, who stood by the wall inspecting the lines of strata. (less)

A family,” he said with a grunt. “Never had one of those before.” “I knew it,” she said softly. “What? That I was lonely?” “No,” she said solemnly, “that you were the child of a couple of particularly ugly rocks.” He glared at her. “You know,” she said, “since you have no family. Must be rocks. It makes sense.” “Really? We were having a moment.” She smiled, putting her hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay, Vathah. I appreciate your sediment.” She got up to go. “Hey,” Vathah said as she walked away. She glanced back at him. “Thanks for smiling.

Captain Copeland picked up the intercom mike and addressed the Roberts’s crew. That he was speaking for himself struck Ens. Jack Moore as unusual and urgent. Normally seaman Jack Roberts was the public address voice of his namesake warship. His southern drawl was all but unintelligible to anyone not acquainted with Dixie’s rhythms and diphthongs. But the skipper’s diction was as crisp as a litigator’s. He was talking fast and sounding more than a little nervous. “A large Japanese fleet has been contacted. They are fifteen miles away and headed in our direction. They are believed to have four battleships, eight cruisers, and a number of destroyers. “This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.

What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is difficult even to even to try to remember moments during which nothing is considered, foreseen, or understood, when there is nothing under a steel helmet but an astonishingly empty head and a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions, more or less distant, more or less violent, and the cries of madmen, to be classified later, according to the outcome of the battle, as the cries of heroes or of murderers. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle before everybody else, who run in any and every direction, howling like banshees. There are the tragic, unbelievable visions, which carry from one moment of nausea to another: guts splattered across the rubble and sprayed from one dying man to another; tightly riveted machines ripped like the belly of a cow which has just been sliced open, flaming and groaning; trees broken into tiny fragments; gaping windows pouring out torrents of billowing dust, dispersing into oblivion all that remains of a comfortable parlor...

…it was during a period he had so much time on his hands that he felt that time had stopped. How could time have stopped? ‘Because,’ he said, ‘and you will understand this when you are older, sometimes you feel that everything around you has come to an end. You feel that you are completely alone, that time is frozen and that you are invisible. At first, you might feel exhilarated by the sense of freedom, but then you’ll be frightened that you are lost and you will never be able to go back.’ He explained that when he first felt this, he had been isolated and afraid and had prised open his watch case to verify that time was indeed passing. The rhythm of the watch might have been imagined. Sound was not enough, he needed to see and touch it. It was the first time that he had dismantled a mechanism. The turning wheels, ticking each second away, had reassured him. It was then that he had comprehended the importance of time.

Throughout the biblical story, from Genesis to Revelation, every radical challenge from the biblical God is both asserted and then subverted by its receiving communities— be they earliest Israelites or latest Christians. That pattern of assertion-and-subversion, that rhythm of expansion-and-contraction, is like the systole-and-diastole cycle of the human heart. In other words, the heartbeat of the Christian Bible is a recurrent cardiac cycle in which the asserted radicality of God’s nonviolent distributive justice is subverted by the normalcy of civilization’s violent retributive justice. And, of course, the most profound annulment is that both assertion and subversion are attributed to the same God or the same Christ. Think of this example. In the Bible, prophets are those who speak for God. On one hand, the prophets Isaiah and Micah agree on this as God’s vision: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, / and their spears into pruning hooks; / nation shall not lift up sword against nation, / neither shall they learn war any more” (Isa. 2:4 = Mic. 4:3). On the other hand, the prophet Joel suggests the opposite vision: “Beat your plowshares into swords, / and your pruning hooks into spears; / let the weakling say, ‘I am a warrior’” (3:10). Is this simply an example of assertion-and-subversion between prophets, or between God’s radicality and civilization’s normalcy? That proposal might also answer how, as noted in Chapter 1, Jesus the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount preferred loving enemies and praying for persecutors while Jesus the Christ of the book of Revelation preferred killing enemies and slaughtering persecutors. It is not that Jesus the Christ changed his mind, but that in standard biblical assertion-and-subversion strategy, Christianity changed its Jesus.