To be a student required a peculiar kind of capitulation, a willingness not simply to do as one is told, but to surrendor the movements of one's soul to the unknown complexities of another's. A willin...
So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved...
Fate was but one more world-born subterfuge, another lie men used to give meaning to their abject helplessness.
Everything we say to one another, we also say to souls absent. We continually speak to the speech that comes after our voice, forever prepare those who would listen. No truth spoken is true simply bec...
Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion. Verily, it is conviction that kills.
Any fool can see the limits of seeing, but not even the wisest know the limits of knowing. Thus is ignorance rendered invisible, and are all Men made fools.
Where hard life makes some maudlin to the point of weeping at mere memory, it grants others a curious immunity to suffering. Like the slaves who work the charcoal pits, their skin grows hardened to th...
Water everywhere, falling in thundering cataracts, singular drops, and draping sheets. Kellhus paused next to one of the shining braziers, peered beneath the bronze visage that loomed orange and scowl...
The darkness was crisp, as though scraped of sight and smell by winter’s razor.
The Dûnyain, Kellhus said after a time, have surrendered themselves to the Logos, to what you would call reason and intellect. We seek absolute awareness, the self-moving thought. The thoughts of all...
Suffer not a whore to live, for she maketh a pit of her womb.
Sorweel: „Then how can we hope to resist him?Harweel: „With our swords and our shields. And when those fail us, with spit and curses.But the spit and the curses, Sorweel would learn, always came first...
Sometimes he would stare at the bare trees for so long, they would lose their radial dimensions and seem something flat, like blood smeared into the wrinkles about an old woman’s eyes.
Screens of tumbling water, breaking the world beyond them into glittering lines and smeared shadows. Kellhus had ceased trying to penetrate them.Power, Anasûrimbor Moënghus said, is always power over....
Piety was simple, and the World, woefully complex. What was virtuous, what was holy: these were verities that only the simple and the enslaved could know with certainty.
He struck his own fire, listened to the night wind roar through the trees. Sometimes, when he could see it, he stared at the Conriyan encampment and counted fires like an idiot child. „Always number y...
He saw clearly now why he so loved this species of war. On the field of battle, his every act was open to the scrutiny of others. Here, however, he stood outside scrutiny, enacted destiny from a place...
For whatever reason, heavy drinking at once intensified and deadened the Dreams. The way they slurred into one another made them seem less immediate, more dreamlike, but the passions that accompanied...
Desperation glares in all Men, but it burns as a beacon when it takes a King for tinder. A
He knew that one never stood still, even while waiting. That sometimes the sheathed knife could cut the most throats of all.