andreai04

[andreai04]

Your friends would probably describe me as nice. But guess what?

I can't stand your friends.

[andreai04]

Father is another name for God in a child's eyes. And Mother is the very earth beneath her feet.

[andreai04]

We're all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglas.

[andreai04]

I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.

Give me the honest asp, who strikes me if I trouble him and not before.

It is youth’s gift not to feel its debts.

[andreai04]

If there was one thing good about this situation, it was reinforcing how great my decisions to (a) hack my governor module and (b) escape were. Being a SecUnit sucked. I couldn't wait to get back to my wild rogue rampage of hitching rides on bot-piloted transports and watching my serials.

[andreai04]

Because you've probably been depressed yourself, you've had days when you've been in terrible pain in places that don't show up in X-rays, when you can't find the words to explain it even to the people who love you. Deep down, in memories that we might prefer to suppress even from ourselves, a lot of us know that the difference between us and that man on the bridge is smaller than we might wish.

[andreai04]

'Darkness still exists,' he agreed. 'In spite of the progress being made which we're told to believe will light up the gloom, eliminate threats and drive away fears. Until now, progress hasn't achieved great success in that field. Until now, all progress has done is to persuade us that darkness is only a glimmering superstition, that there's nothing to be afraid of. But it's not true. There are things to be afraid of. Because darkness will always, always exist. And Evil will always rampage in the darkness, there will always be fangs and claws, killing and blood in the darkness. And witchers will always be necessary. And let's hope they'll always appear exactly where they're needed. Answering the call for help. Rushing to where they are summoned. May they appear with sword in hand. A sword whose gleam will penetrate the darkness, a sword whose brightness disperses the gloom.'

[andreai04]

The only solid partitions left were inside the head.

Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.

Orr felt in him a wish to be liked and a desire to be helpful; the doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them. He boomed "Good afternoon!" so loud because he was never sure he would get an answer.

…the questioner cannot withdraw himself from the question, assuming objectivity—as if the answers were an object. Orr did not speak these thoughts, however; he was in a doctor's hands, and surely the doctor knew what he was doing.

He felt exposed, used. And to what end?

To cross a river, ford it, wade it, swim it, use boat, ferry, bridge, airplane, to go upriver, to go downriver in the ceaseless renewal and beginning of current: all that makes sense. But in going under a river, something is involved that is, in the central meaning of the word, perverse. There are roads in the mind and outside it the mere elaborateness of which shows plainly that, to have got into this, a wrong turning must have been taken way back.

He felt the heaviness upon him, the weight bearing down endlessly. He thought, I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

"I have no right to change things. Nor he to make me do it."

"That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone. 'The mystery of the individual is strongest in sleep,' a writer in my field said."

"Did you ever happen to think, Dr. Haber," he said, quietly enough but stuttering a little, "that there, there might be other people who dream the way I do? That reality's being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the time—only we don't know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know his dream. If that's true, I guess we're lucky not knowing it."

It may remain for us to learn... that our task is only beginning, and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable and unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking;—that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;—that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;—and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives.

“Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass."

He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

The dream is the aquarium of Night.

He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate? she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it?

A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole; such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfilment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.

You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.

[andreai04]

In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

[andreai04]

I paused as the weight of what he was saying sank in. "Then—you haven't the slightest idea how to rule a kingdom."

"Does anyone?" He took my hand, discomfort shifting suddenly into earnestness. "We will learn together."

"Oh God," I said faintly.

“Can you understand the feeling of a winter night, or a spring wind, if you have only read about it?"

It was a strange thing. I had been viewing the marriage question with such trepidation—the ceremony, the spectacle, all that came after it, in the form of this strange and beautiful kingdom that would thence be half mine. And yet, as I sat there upon the lake amidst the tree-shadow and reflected light and the dragonflies tussling with the wind, I no longer knew why I had been so afraid. Likely it was also the threat of Queen Arna hanging over us like a guillotine—well, the prospect of imminent death tends to put things into perspective. It was not that my worries vanished—no magic could manage that. I only realized how much smaller they were than the world that lay before me. A world that I wanted, even after all I had seen, and amidst such a thicket of danger. I wanted it very much. And I especially wanted to share it with Wendell.

“…what need has one for power, nor for anything besides the wind, so clear and sweet-smelling, and the green earth beneath one's feet?"

[andreai04]

And let me tell you something about cat people.

More specifically, cat show people. Actually, never mind. Fuck those guys.

New achievement! Trailblazing Crazy Cat Lady.

You are the first crawler to have entered to the World Dungeon accompanied by a cat. You must really love that thing. Too bad you're both probably going to die a horrible death at any moment. Or maybe not. Look at the prize you just received!

What goblins lack in physical strength, they make up for in pure spunk.

New achievement! You've killed a mob! You're a murderer! He probably had a family!

I looked down at the dead woman. I wondered who she was, why someone like her was outside at 2:30 in the morning on such a night. I'm never going to know her story. Nobody is ever going to know it. I wondered how scared she'd been. Only to be killed by a fellow human.

New achievement! War Criminal.

You have killed more than 20 non-combatants in a single attack!

Question: What's the only thing standing between an innocent child and a happy, fulfilling life?

Answer: You. The answer is you.

Reward: You've received a Gold Asshole's Box!

"You're not going to break me," | said. "You might hurt me, or kill me, but you're not going to break me."

If I'm gonna die, I might as well do it in the pursuit of a worthy cause.

Every single one of those numbers was a person, someone who had lived, breathed, hoped, laughed.

And they were just gone.

What was the point of living, if I couldn't live with myself?

Donut swished her tail angrily. "I have 230 torches in my inventory. It's absolutely ridiculous."

Never trust someone if their motivations aren't clear.

There was something to be said about being anonymous. Quietly efficient.

New Achievement! Wait, Bosses Can Leave Their Rooms? Welcome to the second floor, bitches.

“You have already taken everything from us. Do not ask us to give more than what we have. We are not going to fight or survive on your schedule."

We are all parts of the same, inexorable machine. All of us are afraid.

"If we get to the point where we don't help each other anymore, that's when we stop being human."

When the apocalypse came for Yolanda, she didn't once waver in her dedication to her patients. She was quick to laugh, quick to smile.

And even though Yolanda Martinez was just as terrified as the rest of us, she stood her ground against a force she couldn't possibly hold back.

She lived her entire life as a hero. She died as one, too.

There was a difference between giving aid and sacrificing yourself for people you didn't even know.

It always astounded me how easy it was to get assholes to talk, as long as they were talking about themselves.

For every person that ticked away, I felt I was losing a part of myself, a part of my humanity.

Anyone who mistook fear for respect was a fool.

While especially powerful, fast, and vicious when they are fully grown at level 15, getting them to level 15 is about as likely as a cheerleader from West Virginia reaching her 18th birthday as a virgin.

[andreai04]

I was colder inside than out.

“That's not nothing, to be able to hold your head up."

I wanted to ease the moment past. The temptation was familiar: to go along, to make myself small enough to slip past a looming danger.

But it was all the same choice, every time. The choice between the one death and all the little ones.

I couldn’t buy my life in the last moment, with hands around my throat. I could only buy it by giving in sooner, giving in all the time, like Scheherazade, humbling asking my murderous husband to go on sparing me night after night.

“My father could avenge my murder, but he couldn’t keep me from my husband.”

[andreai04]

He understood terrible purposes. They drove against all odds. They were their own necessity.

"Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

"Grave this on your memory, lad: A world is supported by four things...." She held up four big-knuckled fingers. “... the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing...." She closed her fingers into a fist. "… without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!"

Would it not be more likely to suggest he had lived so long in the presence of extreme danger he misjudged a change in its intensity?

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh.

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.

The terrain enforced its own rhythms.

It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop, if only for a moment. There was no mercy where there could be no stopping.

The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape, how we take part in that basic source of civilization—agriculture.

Does the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness, a fault or cleavage that he may shatter with words or decisions as a diamond-cutter shatters his gem with a blow of a knife?

“A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob."

The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture—it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.

Nothing on this planet had so forcefully hammered into her the ultimate value of water. Not the water-sellers, not the dried skins of the natives, not stillsuits or the rules of water discipline. Here there was a substance more precious than all others—it was life itself and entwined all around with symbolism and ritual.

Water.

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace—those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.

When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.

"One of the most terrible moments in a boy's life," Paul said, "is when he discovers his father and mother are human beings who share a love that he can never quite taste. It's a loss, an awakening to the fact that the world is there and here and we are in it alone. The moment carries its own truth; you can't evade it.”

"Grief is the price of victory," Jessica said.

“While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives.”

"Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, ‘I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied."

Mysticism isn't difficult when you survive each second by surmounting open hostility.

Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.

[andreai04]

Closing my eyes doesn't help. Fire burns brighter in the darkness.

All those people I loved, dead, and we are discussing the next Hunger Games in an attempt to avoid wasting life. Nothing has changed. Nothing will ever change now.

[andreai04]

Not only are we in the districts forced to remember the iron grip of the Capitol's power each year, we are forced to celebrate it.

I'm the kind of girl who, when she might actually be of use, would run to stay alive and leave those who couldn't follow to suffer and die. This is the girl Gale met in the woods today.

No wonder I won the Games. No decent person ever does.

You saved Peeta, I think weakly.

But now I question even that. I knew good and well that my life back in District 12 would be unlivable if I let that boy die.

[andreai04]

"District Twelve. Where you can starve to death in safety," I mutter. Then I glance quickly over my shoulder. Even here, even in the middle of nowhere, you worry someone might overhear you.

Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch — this is the Capitol's way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving another rebellion.

A kind Peeta Mellark is far more dangerous to me than an unkind one. Kind people have a way of working their way inside me and rooting there. And I can't let Peeta do this. Not where we're going.

But then… what? What would my life be like on a daily basis? Most of it has been consumed with the acquisition of food. Take that away and I'm not really sure who I am, what my identity is.

I run for them and surprise even myself when I launch into Haymitch's arms first. When he whispers in my ear, "Nice job, sweetheart," it doesn't sound sarcastic.

[andreai04]

If Vengeance has a mother, her name is Patience.

She’d grown up inside books. No matter how dark life became, shutting out the hurt was as easy as opening a cover.

“Death is the only promise we all keep.”

Thus, the greatest monsters get their way, she realized.

By looking just like the rest of us.

If you can't see your chains, what use is a key?

"Only that there's two kinds of loyalty," Mia replied. "The kind paid for with love, and the kind paid for with silver."

“There’s no softer pillow than a clear conscience.”