andreai04

[andreai04]

“Sometimes you need to accept what you've lost, then move forward. Then you can instead realize what you've gained."

[andreai04]

The most important words a man can say are, "I will do better." These are not the most important words any man can say. I am a man, and they are what I needed to say.

The ancient code of the Knights Radiant says "journey before destination."

Some may call it a simple platitude, but it is far more. A journey will have pain and failure. It is not only the steps forward that we must accept. It is the stumbles. The trials. The knowledge that we will fail. That we will hurt those around us.

But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, the journey ends.

That failure becomes our destination.

To love the journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.

As Navani shut the balcony doors, he closed his eyes and felt the warmth of a distant, unseen light. Then he smiled, and—with a hand still unsteady, like the legs of a child taking his first steps—he took another page and wrote a title for the book.

Oathbringer, My Glory and My Shame.

Written by the hand of Dalinar Kholin.

[andreai04]

"Someone has to care," she said, starting down the hallway. "Too few people care, these days."

I will remember those who have been forgotten.

I can't defeat him. I've got to change him.

[andreai04]

But being a child had little to do with age.

“‘As I fear not a child with a weapon he cannot lift, I will never fear the mind of a man who does not think.’”

“The wisest of men know that to render an insult powerless, you often need only to embrace it.”

He saw it in her eyes. The anguish, the frustration. The terrible nothing that clawed inside and sought to smother her. She knew. It was there, inside. She had been broken. Then she smiled. Oh, storms. She smiled anyway. It was the single most beautiful thing he'd seen in his entire life.

"We all die in the end, you see," Kaladin said. "So I guess what truly matters is just how well you've run.“

I will protect those who cannot protect themselves.

“A man will find a single coin in the mud and talk about it for days, but when his inheritance comes and is accounted one percent less than he expected, then he will declare himself cheated."

[andreai04]

You're stalling, ART-drone said.

I am not. I can stand here and be useless without any ulterior motives, thanks.

[andreai04]

(Yeah, on reflection, I think I misdirected in the wrong direction…)

Balin didn't lift heavy things? Well, fuck Balin then. I said, "All right, where's the fucking cabinet?"

Indah added, "You are the most paranoid person I've ever met, and I've worked in criminal reform for twenty-six years."

I don't even know how to react to that. She's not wrong but hey, I need my paranoia.

[andreai04]

"But I think you're emotionally compromised right now."

That was... that was so completely not true. Stupid humans. Sure, I'd had an emotional breakdown with the whole evisceration thing, but I was fine now, despite the drop in performance reliability. Absolutely fine. And I had to kill the rest of the Targets in the extremely painful ways I'd been visualizing…. I said, "I am not. You're emotionally compromised."

(I know, but at the time it seemed like a relevant comeback.)

This was incredibly weird and awkward. "I don't want to not see you again."

She took a moment to sort out my verbs. "I don't want to not see you again, either."

[andreai04]

…to think that childhood has its own sweet secrets and confirms mortality, and that mortality defines all courage and love. To think that what has looked forward must also look back, and that each life makes its own imitation of immortality: a wheel.

[andreai04]

There is a despair that goes deeper than existence; it runs to the marrow of consciousness, to the seat of the soul.

[andreai04]

All my life, l'd felt alone. And now, at the edge of the apocalypse, I finally realized how much I needed other people.

They will not break me. But I will break them. This is my promise to myself, to my friends, and to you, anyone who reads these words. I will break them all.

[andreai04]

A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.

How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?

[andreai04]

… and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?

[andreai04]

I hadn’t been afraid that she wasn’t my friend, I had been afraid that she was, and what it did to me.

[andreai04]

… perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.

She is forty-nine, and she wonders if this is what feeling old really means—not just a physical deterioration, but an interpersonal. A growing silence caused by the people you most love, who have shaped you and defined your world, going on ahead into whatever comes after.

With no way out, no endgame in sight, and everyone she loves gone, she is unsure how much longer she will keep doing this.

[andreai04]

How men had thus realized the extent of the earth, and felt it to be small, and desired to see what lay beyond its borders…

"It is true that we work with the purest of aims, but that doesn't mean we have worked wisely. Did men truly choose the correct path when they opted to live their lives away from the soil from which they were shaped?”

Their righteousness could not save them from the consequences of their deeds.

Pragmatism avails a savior far more than aestheticism.

"Now mathematics has absolutely nothing to do with reality… I can write the most elegant theorem you've ever seen, and it won't mean any more than a nonsense equation." She gave a bitter laugh. "The positivists used to say all mathematics is a tautology. They had it all wrong: it's a contradiction."

She, like many, had always thought that mathematics did not derive its meaning from the universe, but rather imposed some meaning onto the universe. Physical entities were not greater or less than one another, not similar or dissimilar; they simply were, they existed. Mathematics was totally independent, but it virtually provided a semantic meaning for those entities, supplying categories and relationships. It didn't describe any intrinsic quality, merely a possible interpretation.

But no more. Mathematics was inconsistent once it was removed from physical entities, and a formal theory was nothing if not consistent. Math was empirical, no more than that, and it held no interest for her.

I thought to myself, the ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in.

… by viewing events over a period of time, one recognized that there was a requirement that had to be satisfied, a goal of minimizing or maximizing. And one had to know the initial and final states to meet that goal; one needed knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated.

The existence of free will meant that we couldn't know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness.

Or was it? What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.

From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?

We should always remember that the technologies that made metahumans possible were originally invented by humans, and they were no smarter than we.

Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior, but to Neil it had always seemed too remote to consider, like wealth or fame or glamour. For people like him, Hell was where you went when you died, and he saw no point in restructuring his life in hopes of avoiding that. And since God hadn't previously played a role in Neil's life, he wasn't afraid of being exiled from God. The prospect of living without interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes were never by design, held no terror for him.

Sometimes even bad advice can point a man in the right direction.

Maturity means seeing the differences, but realizing they don't matter.

[andreai04]

Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now.

[andreai04]

What is the limit of human comprehension? How much can the abyss stare back at you before you flinch? The God who severed humanity from that cosmic knowledge was a merciful God.