Sun Eater Quotes

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.

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.

Sad is like a big ocean, and you can’t breathe deep down. You can float on it, you can swim a little, but be careful. Grief is drowning. Grief is deep water.

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

To love is in part the attempt to become a creature worthy of love.

Caves of blue. Strike the hue. Westward, burning. Pages turning. Indiana. Ripe banana. Happiness approaches. Serpents and roaches. There once was a god named Apollo Who plunged in a cave blue and hollow Upon a three-seater The bronze fire-eater Was forced death and madness to swallow

Always forward, always down, and never left or right.

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.

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.

But the ugliness of the world does not fade, and fear and grief are not made less by time. We are only made stronger. We can only float together on their tides, as otters do, hand in hand.

But the truth is poor poetry

Good morning, Hell-A. In the land of the lotus-eaters, time plays tricks on you. One day you’re dreaming, the next, your dream has become your reality. It was the best of times. If only someone had told me. Mistakes were made, hearts were broken, harsh lessons learned. My family goes on without me, while I drown in a sea of pointless pussy. I don’t know how I got here. But here I am, rotting away in the warm California sun. There are things I need to figure out, for her sake, at least. The clock is ticking. The gap is widening. She won’t always love me “no matter what

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

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.

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

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.

You cannot lead as a tyrant. The people under you will not let you. To lead is a kind of service, a duty you owe to those who follow.

Deep truths there may be, but none is deeper than this: Those lost to us do not return, nor the years turn back. Rather it is that we carry a piece of those lost to us within ourselves, or on our backs. Thus ghosts are real, and we never escape them.

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.

One cannot step in the same river twice, and home is not home when you return, for you are not yourself. The man you were yesterday died yesterday, and is only a piece of the man of today, as you will be tomorrow.

We are beasts of burden, Hadrian, we men. We struggle, and by that struggle are filled, and so define ourselves. That is the way.

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.

The greater part of wisdom is in silence.

Knowledge is the mother of fools,” he said. “Remember, the greatest part of wisdom is in recognizing your own ignorance.

I personally believe breathatarianism to be the highest mode of human living [...] breathing in pure air, absorbing the direct light and energies of the sun, bathing in pure water [...] I look at the obituaries every morning and ain't nobody listed but you eaters.

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

But then, so few of us truly think themselves evil. They simply think good and evil matters of opinion, and seek to impose their opinion—which is evil—on good. Nothing is evil in its beginning, it only grows that way.

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.

I have had many names. During the war, I was Hadrian Halfmortal and Hadrian the Deathless. After the war, I was the Sun Eater. To the poor people of Borosevo, I was a myrmidon called Had. To the Jaddians, I was Al Neroblis. To the Cielcin, I was Oimn Belu

Always accuse the enemy of what you’re doing.

We believe our fear destroyed by new bravery. It is not. Fear is never destroyed. It is only made smaller by the courage we find after. It is always there.

Your road will not be easy, nor your burden light." "That does not matter," I said. "It must be.

Men are slower to act from principle than self-interest, and far slower to act on principle than jealousy or revenge.

But there are women and women, commander. Some ask nothing of us, and so we are nothing to them. But there are those women who ask all of us. Those are the ones worth giving all for.

Joy is rare, a thing always of the now, existing without regard for time past or time future, and without depending on them.

Fear is the death of reason...and reason the death of fear.

I read,” I said, and shrugged. “People always accuse me of wasting my time, but they don’t complain when I have their answers.

Funny thing about lessons: the idiot student thinks when he is given a little fact that he owns it—that two and two is always four no matter the circumstance. Just as it was not true for Orwell, it is not true for anyone. True lessons require not only knowing, but that the student practices his knowledge again and again. Thus knowledge becomes us, and we become more than the animal and the machine. That is why the best teachers are students always, and the best students are never fully educated. I had forgotten Gibson’s lesson for a moment, but stood a little straighter, shouldering as a pack my grief, my regret and self-loathing.

The artist sees things not in terms of what is or might be, but in terms of what must be. Of what our world must become. This is why a portrait will—to the human observer—always defeat the photograph.

I do not consider myself a great artist, though she made me wish I was. I could not have known at this first meeting how many times I would fail to capture her, in charcoal and in life. The brazen declaration of her; the pride in that upturned chin, the pointed nose, and the tidy carelessness that put her above the opinions of lesser men. There's little sign of her wit-so close to cruelty-in any of the drawings I made of her, and this poor prose cannot contain her beauty, body or soul. They are only echoes, as is this.

But to know a thing and to see it, to experience it, are as different as the moon and the finger pointing to it. Knowledge is not truth, only the apprehension of it. Experience is something else entirely.

Let us move to the only beginning I’ve a right to: my own.

A man is the sum of his memories—and more—he is the sum of all those others he has met, and what he learned from them.

Your friends loved you, as I do—as your Valka does. That is why they saved you. And that love, I told you, is a mighty thing!

We do not get to choose our circumstances or our trials. We can only choose how to respond to them.

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

And in every age there is a stigma attached to extreme intelligence

I told you once that the universe has no center, and thus every point is its center, and it is so. If I have strained you, reader, by my repeated insistence that every action matters, that every moment of every life is the moment, the axis about which all things turn, understand that I say these things because they are true. Every step, every turn, every refusal to step. Everything matters. The cosmos is not cold or indifferent because we are not indifferent, and we are a part of that cosmos, of that grand order which has dropped from the hand of He who created it. Every decision creates its ripples, every moment burns its mark on time, every action leads us ever nearer to that last day, that final last battle and the answer to that last question: Darkness? Or light?

True lessons require not only knowing, but that the student practices his knowledge again and again. Thus knowledge becomes us, and we become more than the animal and the machine. That is why the best teachers are students always, and the best students are never fully educated.

Because we are not good.” It took me a moment to realize that it had been I who’d answered. Both my master and student looked at me. “If we were good men, we’d not need all this reflection.

The rightly tuned mind does not deny its emotions, but floats with them. It accepts what it feels and so incorporates that feeling to itself. Thus the mind is not subject, but rules itself.

Ti abatre!” she yelled. I loved you. Loved. The hatch sealed. Our shuttle tore out past the static field and into the long and silent Dark.

We are clay, shaped as the mountain is shaped: by the wind, the tramping foot, and the rain. By the world. The mark of other hands is on us, but we are ourselves alone.

Joy is a wind, Hadrian. It will pick you up only to smash you against the rocks again.

Religion and science are old enemies,” Imlarros said. Gibson cleared his throat, and in a thin voice strained by the descent, said, “They’re not, brother. Only fools think so.

Who must stand when those whose duty is standing have gone? Those who can.

Standing among my final friends in all the universe, I raised my sword and laughed.

There is pain always, and ugliness, but the light and beauty of the world shine always above and beyond the powers of darkness to destroy.

We are all shaped by our suffering. That we are only what we are is ever our chiefest sin.

I would have gone with you to the end, Had,” he said. “The very end.

We have need of heroes, however broken, however terrible, however insufficient they may be. And we have need of more than one hero, for heroes do break, you know.

The frightened man eats himself

And it is in the nature of stories that times present and past are present in time future, and the future present in the past.

Fear is death to reason.

I am the mother of Odin's stallion, Sleipnir. I am the father of Fenrir Sun-Eater, and of Hel Half-Rotted and of Jormungund the World-Serpent. I am Loki Scar-Lip, Loki Skywalker, Loki Giant's Child, Loki Lie-Smith. I am Loki, who is fire and wit and hate. I am Loki. And I will be under an obligation to no one.

The Golden Age ended because men forgot philosophy in their pursuit of knowledge. They traded a love of wisdom for progress, and it destroyed them.” In a small voice, he added, “The ancient Christians were right to name pride the greatest of man’s sins.

Focus blurs, Gibson used to say. Focus blinds. You must take in all of a thing by seeing the totality of it, not by focusing on minutiae. This is as important for a ruler as it is for a painter.

The dead become ever closer companions as we grow old ourselves and nearer eternity. And afterlife or no, they live on in us. Perhaps that is why it seems we have ghosts. Because we carry them in ourselves.

And in its sky was such a sun as no opium eater could ever have imagined in his wildest dreams. Too hot to be white, it was a searing ghost at the frontiers of the ultraviolet, burning its planets with radiations which would be instantly lethal to all earthly forms of life. For millions of kilometers around extended great veils of gas and dust, fluorescing in countless colors as the blasts of ultraviolet tore through them. It was a star against which Earth’s pale sun would have been as feeble as a glowworm at noon.

You can be too free. That's chaos. To be truly free is to be like one who is adrift on a raft in the middle of the sea. One can sail anywhere in any direction. But what good is that by itself? You need a goal. You need constraints. You need to know which way to sail with whatever meagre supplies and abilities you have. The properly led life is one that draws the best path between who you could become, and who you are today. But this is accomplished by sacrificing certain freedoms. By making choices.

The silence was more profound than that of midnight: and to me the silence of a summer morning is more touching than all other silence, because, the light being broad and strong, as that of noon-day at other seasons of the year, it seems to differ from perfect day, chiefly because man is not yet abroad: and thus, the peace of nature, and of the innocent creatures of God, seems to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man, and his restless and unquiet spirit, are not there to trouble its sanctity.

We are beasts of burden, we men. We struggle, and by that struggle are filled.

But in most places in the galaxy, nothing is happening. The nature of things is peaceful, and that is a mighty thing.

Women are ever the judges of men, our jury and, though their hands seldom grasp the knife, our executioners.

The worlds have enough of tyrants, enough of murderers and genocides.

Great is Truth, and mighty above all things.

There is no future,” the seer replied. “Everything already is. They have only to choose.

A door is many things,” Tanaran replied, speaking with the gravity of a proverb, “and once opened, many things may enter.

Against such demons as these, all men are brothers.

That may be, but my tutor always told me that all heroes are fools until victorious.

A fear born of the fact that though we may come back to a place at the end of our journeys, we never really return, for we are not the same person who departed.

Better to let them be fools. There are some arguments you can’t win without violence. Like I’m always telling you, reason has its limits.

But folk ain’t that different, one-to-one, no matter what’s on the outside. Doesn’t even matter where you been. Hurt the same, need the same. Need someone to remind them they’re human.

Evil occurs because we are insufficient to challenge it. Too weak to stop it at the gates, too blind to see it bubbling within. Were we all angels in our virtue and heroes in our capacity, we might hold all chaos at bay, might stop even the unkindling of the stars. Yet we are but men.

I’ve lost control, I remember thinking. Somewhere in all this, I lost control. We are not always the authors of our own stories. Some of us never are. I think that is what we struggle for: the command of our own lives. We struggle against our families, against the state, against nature, against our own weakness. All that we might choose for ourselves, if only for a moment. If only once.

How like a beautiful statue of ice it was, melting in the sun. I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them. And then the Government, seeing how advantageous it was to have people reading only about passionate lips and the fist in the stomach, circled the situation with your fire-eaters. So,

It was ironic that the same people who had enacted nuclear war on the Homeworld, who presided over the refugee camps and rotted the ecosphere, had balked in the face of blood sport. Would they call us barbarians, those men of ancient days?

She once told him about the mysterious trampled-down places found in fields, which the peasants superstitiously called werewolves' nests. Coming across one of these sites, she fell to her knees and buried her face in the flattened yellow grasses, hoping to inhale the odor of a werewolf, a csordásfarkas. As if his scent was a charm. She smelled nothing but hay burned by the afternoon sun.

The poets say that one’s fears grow less with trial, that we become men without fear if tried enough. I have not found it to be so. Rather, on each occasion we are tested, we become stronger than our fears. It is all we can do. Must do. Lest we perish for our failings.

Whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow—the most mournful that ear ever heard. Mournful! That is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries. Many times since, upon a summer day, when the sun is at its hottest, I have heard the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell: it is in this world the one sole audible symbol of eternity.

If I have strained you, reader, by my repeated insistence that every action matters, that every moment of every life is the moment, the axis about which all things turn, understand that I say these things because they are true. Every step, every turn, every refusal to step. Everything matters.

My period continued, an inevitable cycle, yet every month I was somehow surprised by the violent pain. It was as if I refused to believe my body, something I’d trusted for years, would repeatedly betray me. My stomach ate itself from the inside, a revelry I had been dragged to, a feast I was forced to join though I was not hungry. The meal lasted four to six days, gorging on cramps, the spilled crumbs falling out of me stained with raspberry jam. My stomach was never a clean eater, gnawing on my uterus and fallopian tubes, leaving bite marks. I counted each rotation of the sun with heightening anxiety until it passed and I reset the clock. The knife carved my insides into pot roasts; the fork jabbed my sides into holey cheese. I could distinguish each fork prong—the pain was profound. My guts twisted around the spoon like spaghetti, tangled noodles slathered in scarlet marinara. Menstruation was more smashed acidic tomatoes than sweet fruit compote. I wiped my fingers on white jeans made of napkins and left streaks dried to rust. The stains came out with bleach and detergent. I died and regenerated every month. How else could I define the experience? The reasonable explanation was death. I decided when my body was wheeled into the morgue, the coroner would declare I died of being a woman. Which was far better than dying of being a man.

Sometimes we say things and do not understand them. In doing so, like Dante, we step off the path and enter into a dark and dangerous new world. There, our lies and wrong turnings swallow us like the sands of the desert. The world objects, or other people do, and we are left desolate and alone. But one need not know Truth to speak it. Truth is, and may be found as readily as disaster and by the same process. One need only put one’s finger on it, or one’s foot in it.

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. For themselves, for their own lives, for some imagined future. And in the name of safety, security, piety, they labor to found future heaven on present horror. But their kingdom of heaven is in the mind, in the future that will never be, and their present horrors are real.

Like Nycteris, she thought, and cringed. There was an old fairy tale called The History of Photogen and Nycteris that she still carried a copy of. The main character in it was a young woman who had been raised by a cruel witch, inside a cave beneath a castle. The girl had grown up knowing only darkness, which at the time hadn’t seemed much of an issue to child-Devon. But the general idea was that Nycteris’s world was narrow: she thought the lamp in her cave was a sun, and that the universe was just a tiny series of rooms. She knew nothing of society and had very few books. A relatable situation, for a book eater woman. One day, Nycteris escaped her cave by following a stray firefly. She ended up in the castle garden. But her reactions in the story were strange and unexpected. Upon espying the moon for the first time, Nycteris decided that it must be a giant lamp, akin to the one in her cave. She saw the sky, and likewise decided it must be another kind of roof. And when she looked at the horizon, she saw not a limitless world, but merely another room, albeit with distant walls. The concept of outside didn’t exist for one such as Nycteris, nor could it ever. Her upbringing had given her such a fixed perspective that, even when encountering something new, she could only process it along the lines already drawn for her. The story’s complexity had baffled Devon as a child, but she understood it well enough now. The truth was, Nycteris never really escaped. Oh, she got a prince and a castle and the cruel witch died at the end. But Nycteris could not ever leave the cave, because the cave was a place in her mind; it was the entire way she thought about reality. Princesses like that couldn’t be rescued.

You know, I always wanted to be like him. When I was a boy. He was always better than me. A better student, a better fighter, a better everything. He could be an ass . . . ” He laughed a little. “But I loved him—love him, I suppose. I don’t think he’s dead. But it did always seem like I was in his shadow, you know?” “I do,” Laurent said, “but shadows shrink in time.

As she moved toward the water closet, I asked her a question. A very old question. “Valka,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Am I a good man?” She turned then—hands on the door frame—and surveyed me a long time. What did she see with those inhuman eyes? Those eyes that saw everything without exception, without distortion? A smile split her face. A true smile, brighter even than her pity had been bright. “You’re still asking that question?” she managed to say, laughter cracking her words. “After all this time?” I could only blink at her. “Do you not have your answer a hundred times over?” A brief tremor shook her arm, but she hid it behind her back and shook her head again. “Monsters don’t have doubts.

How small I felt, how meager my actions seemed, and how inconsequential. How tiny were all the actions of man against that blank and uncaring universe? How could any of it matter? How could any of us? I know better now. The universe has no center, they say . . . and yet the universe is infinite. Is not then every point the center of the universe, surrounded on all sides by infinite space? Copernicus was as wrong as he was right. The Earth of old was as much the center of the universe as the sun she circled. So too were Mars, and Jupiter beyond.

Have you ever seen someone speak of something that consumes them? That lights them up from the foundations of their soul? Valka spoke with such fervency that I forgot myself for a time. Whatever animosity she had felt toward me upon our first meeting seemed to have mostly evaporated, vanished into a hesitant respect for me and for my situation. And I? I feared her. I feared what she represented, and that I cared what she thought of me. I feared the secrets I was made to carry. My name, my blood. I feared that she would think me false, my respect for her work feigned, when it was the thing I’d shown her that was most true. Thus we are all destroyed by those things that matter to us, as she mattered to me in my loneliness.

Have you ever been made to contemplate your death? Locked in a tower cell, perhaps, or in some bastille of the Chantry to await your end on the edge of the White Sword? Have you ever sat there through a sleepless night and counted the seconds you have left like grains of sand? I pray that you have not. It is one thing to die and quite another to have suffered the fear of death and survive. I wish neither for you, who has suffered both. You stand as does the solitary candle in chapel, flickering against the Dark. A darkness not of space but of time, of the yawning maw of some empty, echoing future forever barred to you. It is comforting to know the sun will always rise--that is, until it does not, until it dissolves into cold ash and the universe runs down, or you do. Fire fades. And life. Or it is snuffed out. For the chapel candle, that is no tragedy--the candle knows not when it is extinguished. It is only a symbol, only the avatar of the unconquered sun lit to keep watch through the night in the Chantry temple. But the human flame knows, and it shivers not from wind but from fear. From the sickness of the heart. And so I shivered in my cloying bed and on the floor besides it when I could lie amongst its folds no more. Though I was but one score and three years--next to nothing compared to the centuries I have since counted--I felt my age and the specter of my fleeting mortality. I felt the ache in every once-broken bone, felt every scar from every would healed on the street and in the Colosso.