Tiamat Quotes

Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and her name was Lilith Eve Hagar Jezebel Delilah Pandora Jahi Tamar and there was a wicked witch and she was also called goddess and her name was Kali Fatima Artemis Hera Isis Mary Ishtar and there was a wicked witch and she was also called queen and her name was Bathsheba Vashti Cleopatra Helen Salome Elizabeth Clytemnestra Medea and there was a wicked witch and she was also called witch and her name was Joan Circe Morgan le Fay Tiamat Maria Leonza Medusa and they had this in common: that they were feared, hated, desired, and worshiped.

There are people I love. There are people who have loved me. I fought for what I believed, protected those I could, and stood my ground against the encroaching darkness. Good enough.

Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook.

There was no better way to seem trustworthy than to be liked by a dog, and there was no better way to convince a dog to like you than bribery.

But pacifism only works when your enemy has a conscience.

You take care of your tools, your tools take care of you.

I’m not sure dying free is as attractive when it stops being rhetorical.

Growing older was a falling away of everything that didn’t matter. And a deepening appreciation of all the parts that were important enough to stay.

Easy to make rules,” Emma said. “Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth shit, we’ve done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people.

The universe is always stranger than you think.

I don’t want Tiamat to go back,” said Jeremy sullenly. “I want her to stay here with me.” Miss Priest laughed. It was not a horrible laugh at all. “What a terrible idea!” she said. “Why do you want her to stay?” Because I love her. I don’t want to lose her.” Miss Priest reached out and took his chin in her hand. She looked into his eyes. “You silly boy,” she said. “Nothing you love is lost. Not really. Things, people—they always go away, sooner or later. You can’t hold them, any more than you can hold moonlight. But if they’ve touched you, if they’re inside you, then they’re still yours. The only things you ever really have are the ones you hold inside your heart.

There were so many last times that passed unrecognized. Knowing in the moment what was ending and wouldn’t come again was precious.

That’s the thing about autocracy. It looks pretty decent while it still looks pretty decent. Survivable, anyway. And it keeps looking like that right up until it doesn’t. That’s how you find out it’s too late.

It was, Elvi thought, like finding a sea turtle who thoroughly understood Godel’s incompleteness theorem, but didn’t have any sea-turtley application for it.

The people who have power over you are weak too. They shit and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarrassed by the stupid things they did when they were young that everyone else has forgotten. And so they’re vulnerable. We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are. We can’t transcend it. So when they watch you, they hand you the power to change what they are too.

But all the stories about the devil making a deal and then cheating missed the point. The real horror was that once the bargain was struck, the devil didn’t cheat. He gave you exactly and explicitly all that had been promised. And the price was your soul.

Chapter Fourteen: Teresa “So not unnatural at all,” Holden said, tipping a little more wine from the bottle into the doctor’s glass. “Meaningless term,” Cortázar said. “Humans arose inside nature. We’re natural. Everything we do is natural. The whole idea that we are different in category is either sentimental or religious. Irrelevant from a scientific perspective.” Tiamat's Wrath

There are only a couple kinds of anger. You get angry because you're afraid of something or you get angry because you're frustrated.

It gets better, though. Right?” “Sometimes. Sometimes it’s just one shit sandwich after another.

That was what decades of marriage were for. Intimacy and pattern matching as a kind of telepathy.

That black, maddening firmament; that vast cosmic ocean, endlessly deep in every direction, both Heaven and Pandemonium at once; mystical Zodiac, speckled flesh of Tiamat; all that is chaos, infinite and eternal. And yet, it's somehow the bringing to order of this chaos which perhaps has always disturbed me most. The constellations, in their way, almost bring into sharper focus the immensity and insanity of it all - monsters and giants brought to life in all their gigantic monstrosity; Orion and Hercules striding across the sky, limbs reaching for lightyears, only to be dwarfed by the likes of Draco, Pegasus, or Ursa Major. Then bigger still - Cetus, Eridanus, Ophiuchus, and Hydra, spanning nearly the whole of a hemisphere, sunk below the equator in that weird underworld of obscure southern formations. You try to take them in - the neck cranes, the eyes roll, and the mind boggles until this debilitating sense of inverted vertigo overcomes you...

In a fight like this, unless you’re willing to lose everything to win, you lose it all by losing.

I want this war over with, and a real peace established. The kind where people can be angry with each other and hate each other and no one has to die over it. That’d be enough.

She liked the analogy not because it was accurate, but because it was evocative. That was what made analogies useful.

I’ll die for that,” Emma said. “I’ll die so that people can be fuckups and still find mercy.

You know who talks about moral victories? The team that lost.

Governments exist on confidence. Not on liberty. Not on righteousness. Not on force. They exist because people believe that they do. Because they don’t ask questions.

Evolution was a paste-and-baling-wire process that came up with half-assed solutions like pushing teeth through babies’ gums and menstruation. Survival of the fittest was a technical term that covered a lot more close-enough-is-close-enough than actual design.

Dreams were fragile things to build with. Titanium and ceramic lasted longer.

Tiamat, Mot and Leviathan are not evil, but are simply fulfilling their cosmic role. They have to die and endure dismemberment before an ordered cosmos can emerge from chaos.

So she’d lied. That was interesting. She’d told him what he wanted to hear, and it wasn’t even because she wanted to protect him or keep him safe. It was just easier. She understood now why adults lied to children. It wasn’t love. It was exhaustion. And she was like them now. They’d eaten her.

The huge moments in life seemed like they should have more ceremony and effects. The important words—the life-changing ones—should echo a little. But they didn’t. They sounded just like everything else.

The universe is always stranger than you think. It didn’t matter how broad her imagination was, how cynical, how joyous and open, how well researched or wild minded. The universe was always stranger. Every dream, every imagining, however lavish and improbable, inevitably fell short of the truth.

Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled.

We’re all going to lose each other eventually, and that’s been true since before we were a crew. That’s what being born means. Everything else is just specifics.

She tapped the red dot on the map that was the Tempest. “Anything you can do, I can do better.

That was the thing about hubris. It only became clear in retrospect.

Routine was what kept the darkness at bay, when anything did.

Getting what you want fucks you up,

Like a religious fanatic, the man really believed that everything he’d done was justified by his goal in doing it.

It was contrast that gave things shape. Brightness made darkness. Fullness made emptiness. Loneliness defined the borders of whatever not-loneliness was called. They were comparative.

It was normal to sacrifice animals. Rats, pigeons, pigs. Dogs. Chimpanzees. Biology had always suffered the cognitive push-pull of proving that humans were just another kind of animal while at the same time claiming to be morally different in kind.

Jillian Houston,” Alex said. “She’s a good kid. She’ll make a fine captain.” “I remember her father being an asshole.” “She’s also kind of an asshole.

You're never going to convince me that this whole 'sky' thing isn't fucking creepy. I like my air held in by something I can see, thank you very much.

When everyone thinks the flood’s coming up, each little bit of normalcy is a sandbag.

And that’s the point I keep trying to make with her, my friend. In a fight like this, unless you’re willing to lose everything to win, you lose it all by losing.

I’m sorry,” Elvi said. “Wait. No. I’m actually not. Are you fucking crazy?

Having a new high consul would be difficult under any circumstances, but it would be less difficult if there were a story with it.

The universe was always stranger than you expected. Sometimes it was full of wonders. Sometimes full of horrors.

Chapter 21 : Elvi “We could always mutiny,” Fayez said brightly. “We wouldn’t stand a chance,” Travon said. “I did the nav analysis. Tiamat's Wrath

The Enuma Elish, the epic of Tiamat and Marduk, is thought to be a direct inspiration for the biblical book of Genesis.

Chapter Fourteen: Teresa “Your dad’s kind of an asshole,” Timothy said, his expression philosophical, his voice matter-of-fact. “And he’s killed a lot more people than Holden ever did.” Tiamat's Wrath

Marduk decides to create mankind from Qingu, who they claim had started the war with Tiamat (6:25), so that "the work of the gods shall be imposed (on them) and they [the gods] shall be at leisure" (6:5-8).38

If it had been football, Laconia would have had a world-class goalie and a couple of professional strikers against Naomi’s team of four hundred grade school children and three Donnager-class football hooligans.

When in the height heaven was not named, 2. And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name, 3. And the primeval Apsû, who begat them, 4. And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both,— 5. Their waters were mingled together,

It felt like relief at the time. Like her soul had been rubbed raw, and the container was her bandage. Her whole life, she’d survived the unsurvivable by falling back and getting small. And every time, she had come back healed. Scarred, sometimes. But healed.

CHAPTER ELEVEN Man The Destroyer   Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life…the pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise, the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good – Hermes Trismegistus As we mentioned, the titanic reversals were not merely physical, but psychic. Human consciousness was as shattered as the world, and the consequences of ruined minds is seen all around us. In short, the human tendency to commit evil acts is the consequence of trauma primarily caused by four tragic events: The Destruction of Tiamat (and first deluge) Genetic Alteration The War of the Gods The Pole Shift (second deluge and subsequent global carnage and fallout) Once we accept that colossal violent upheavals took place, we cannot avoid contemplating their effect on consciousness. Strangely, no mainstream scientist or psychologist has competently addressed this fundamentally important question. Academics avoid dealing with the problem of evil because they know what a threat the answers pose to the Establishment, and particularly to religion.

That’s the secret, you know.” “What’s the secret?” Kajri smiled. “The people who have power over you are weak too. They shit and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarrassed by the stupid things they did when they were young that everyone else has forgotten.

correct reading emerges: When, in the beginning, The Lord created the Heaven and the Earth, The Earth, not yet formed, was in the void, and there was darkness upon Tiamat. Then the Wind of the Lord swept upon its waters and the Lord commanded, "Let there be lightning!" and there was a bright light.

There was a woman I knew. Long time. She used to say you can’t judge anyone by what they say. You have to watch what they do.” “She said that.” “I recognize the irony.

Are you sure you’re okay, Cap? You seem kind of fucked.

She was very aware that she was working on what Fayez called fuck-it-if-it’s-not-happening-right-now protocol.

found a level of cooperation and consent that shocked Holden at first and then left him with a permanent sense of mild disappointment in humans as a species.

Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled. Anything else was just a postponement of the next round of violence.

I just had the most interesting conversation,” Fayez said. “I could say the same,” she said. “But mine’s classified, so why don’t you go first.

Just part of the donkey show.” “Dog and pony,” Holden said. Then, seeing her reaction. “The phrase is dog and pony show.” “Sure it is,” she said.

More than power, Duarte made everything that surrounded him seem born of confidence. It was a good trick, because even after Holden saw through it, it still worked.

Chapter Fifteen: Naomi As they left, the chief engineer looked back. His eyes met hers. There was a in them.

Nature was beautiful, wherever she found it. And it was cruel. She didn’t know why she kept expecting humanity to be different.

Her voice was thoughtful. “Getting what you want fucks you up,

One little change early on could mean a whole different life.

Fuel, bullets, or food. The hierarchy of needs, wartime edition.

I'm not sure dying free is as attractive when it stops being rhetorical.

When people get too comfortable, they get loose. Sloppy.

We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are.

was like waking up after a long and terrible dream to find that whatever it was hadn’t actually happened. In all her long life, it was maybe the most beautiful moment she’d ever had.

It might be an artifact of the way human minds seemed to peg “normal” to whatever they’d experienced first and then bristled at everything afterward that failed to match it closely enough.

He had access to the state propaganda feeds, but he couldn’t bring himself to watch them. Either they’d make him angry, and he couldn’t afford to be angry, or through simple repetition they’d start to seem true.

Chapter Five: Elvi A few decades earlier and about two hundred thousand trillion kilometers from where she currently sat, a tiny node of active protomolecule in a biological matrix had entered the orbit of a planet called Ilus, hitchhiking on the gunship Rocinante. As the uncanny semisentient intelligence of the protomolecule tried to make contact with other nodes in the gate builders’ long-dead empire, it woke up mechanisms that had been dormant for millions—or even billions—of years. The end result had been an ancient factory returning to life, a massive robot attack, the melting of one artificial moon, and the detonation of a power plant that nearly cracked the planet in two. All in all, a really shitty experience. So when Elvi’s team took the catalyst out of isolation in unexplored systems to do a similar if slightly better-controlled reaching out to the artifacts and remains (..) Tiamat's Wrath

The people who have power over you are weak too. They shit and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarrassed by the stupid things they did when they were young that everyone else has forgotten. And so they’re vulnerable.

Easy to make rules,” Emma said. “Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth shit, we’ve done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people. Laconians making the same mistake as ever. Our rules are good, and they’d work perfectly if it were only a different species.” “You sound like someone I know,” Naomi said. “I’ll die for that,” Emma said. “I’ll die so that people can be fuckups and still find mercy.

We need to shoot him," Ilich said. "Whatever that thing in there is? That's not the high consul. I don't know what the hell it is, but the only sane thing any of us can do right now is put a bullet in its brain." Trejo drew his sidearm, took it by its barrel and held it out towards Ilich. "If you're sure that'll kill him, be my guest.

The only thing in my head was Don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up. And then I’d fuck up. I focused so hard on the thing I was afraid of, I ran straight into its arms every single time.” “Are you trying to make me feel better?” “No,” Chava said. “We’re too old for that. I’m trying to make you feel like you aren’t alone in it. That’s all I’ve got.

In Babylonian myth—as later in the Bible—there was no creation out of nothing, an idea that was alien to the ancient world. Before either the gods or human beings existed, this sacred raw material had existed from all eternity. When the Babylonians tried to imagine this primordial divine stuff, they thought that it must have been similar to the swampy wasteland of Mesopotamia, where floods constantly threatened to wipe out the frail works of men. In the Enuma Elish, chaos is not a fiery, seething mass, therefore, but a sloppy mess where everything lacks boundary, definition and identity: When sweet and bitter mingled together, no reed was plaited, no rushes muddied the water, the gods were nameless, natureless, futureless.2 Then three gods did emerge from the primal wasteland: Apsu (identified with the sweet waters of the rivers), his wife, Tiamat (the salty sea), and Mummu, the Womb of chaos. Yet these gods were, so to speak, an early, inferior model which needed improvement. The names “Apsu” and “Tiamat” can be translated “abyss,” “void” or “bottomless gulf.” They share the shapeless inertia of the original formlessness and had not yet achieved a clear identity.

The ancients called the saving word the Logos, an expression of divine reason.I04 So much unreason / was in man that he 42 /43 needed reason to be saved. If one waits long enough, one sees how the Gods all change into serpents and underworld dragons in the end. This is also the fate ofthe Logos: in the end it poisons us all. In time, we were all poisoned, but unknowingly we kept the One, the Powerful One, the eternal wanderer in us away from the poison. We spread poison and paralysis around us in that we want to educate all the world around us into reason. Some have their reason in thinking, others in feeling. Both are servantsofLogos,andinsecretbecomeworshipersoftheserpent.I05 You can subjugate yourself shackle yourself in irons, whip yourself bloody every day: you have crushed yourself but not overcome yourself Precisely through this you have helped the Powerful One, strengthened your paralysis, and promoted his blindness. He would like to see it in others, and inflict it on them, and would like to force the Logos on you and others, longingly and tyrannically with blind obstinacy and vacant stubborness. Give him a taste of Logos. He is afraid, and he already trembles from afar since he suspects that he has become outdated, and that a tiny droplet ofthe poison ofLogos will paralyze him. But because he is your beautiful, much loved brother, you will act slavishly toward him and you would like to spare him as you have spared none of your fellow men. You spared no merry and no powerful means to strike your fellow men with the poisoned arrow. Paralyzed game is an unworthy prey. The powerful huntsman, who wrestles the bull to the ground and tears the lion to pieces and strikes the army of Tiamat, is your bow's worthy target.

If it had been football, Laconia would have had a world-class goalie and a couple of professional strikers against Naomi's team of four hundred grade school children and three Donnager-class football hooligans.

And what happened to Captain Burnham?” “Early retirement,” Emma said. “Cashed out and bought part of a medical clinic.” “Probably smarter than all of us put together.” “I’m leaning toward coward.

Get me that inventory. Get it ready for rapid transfer once we find the ship.” “Or,” Jillian said, “get ready to fall into Jupiter and die because we’re way under orbital speed now and don’t have an engine.” “Or that,” Bobbie agreed, surprised at how much she wanted to push across the room and punch Jillian in the face.

Primary mission is fucked, but secondary is a win.” “A moral victory, I guess,” Bobbie sighed. “You know who talks about moral victories?” Jillian asked as she floated out of the room. “The team that lost.

Maybe it’s because he thinks your dad’s an asshole.” “My dad’s not an asshole. And Holden’s a killer. He doesn’t get to judge other people.” “Your dad’s kind of an asshole,” Timothy said, his expression philosophical, his voice matter-of-fact. “And he’s killed a lot more people than Holden ever did.

The answer was no before,” Burnham said, then pointed toward Naomi with his chin. “Now that this one is on my deck, the answer’s go fuck yourself.

Muskrat floated in the middle of the room, a complex diaper on her haunches with a hole for her tail. She started wagging as soon as Holden came in. It made her gyrate around a center of mass defined by her larger and mostly still body and her lighter and fast-moving tail.

Too many masters, not enough time,” Elvi said. “I’ll be back when I can.

The appellation of the path as Draconian also indicates its direction; the light esotericism leads to a unity with male gods of the light, like Yahweh or Marduk. The dark esotericism, on the other hand, leads out towards primordial dragon entities such as Leviathan, Tehom or Tiamat, who existed long before the gods of light and who exist in the infinity beyond the divine light. To the initiated adept on the Qliphotic path, the darkness of infinity is a hidden light, so infinitely brighter than the light of the gods that it is thus perceived as darkness.

The people who have power over you are weak too. They shit and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarrassed by the stupid things they did when they were young that everyone else has forgotten. And so they’re vulnerable. We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are.

Left alone, Holden ate his breakfast in silence and let the atmosphere of the room wash over him. Another of the things he’d learned during his time as a dancing bear was not to search for clues to anything. The effort of the search actually made him overlook things. It was better to be passive and notice what was there. Like the way the cooks spoke to each other, scowling. Like the speed of the dignitaries walking into and out of the commissary, the way their shoulders were tight.

There’s only a couple kinds of anger. You get angry because you’re afraid of something or you get angry because you’re frustrated.

Hope in one hand and shit in the other. See which one fills up first. Get to work.

The bar was worse than shitty. Shitty had character. The place was generic. Fake stone meant to echo a tunnel on Ceres or Pallas marked with graffiti to make it look edgy until you noticed that the pattern of it repeated every couple meters. The appearance of counterculture as churned out by a corporate designer.

Fayez pulled a jar of scalp cream out of a cabinet and began rubbing it into her short, tight curls with his fingertips. It felt wonderful to have him massaging her head. When you find a man who takes pleasure in helping you avoid dry scalp, Elvi thought, you keep him.