All men recited self-aggrandizing stories, words of ascendancy and exception, to balm the inevitable indignities of fact. An emperor need only repeat those stories to command the hearts of men.
All Kellhus could see of his father were two fingers and a thumb lying slack upon a bare thigh. The thumbnail gleamed.As Dûnyain, the disembodied voice continued, you had no choice. To command yoursel...
Above all the mighty detest change.
A lifetime of cannibal hatred
. . and that revelation murdered all that I once did know. Where once I asked of the God, 'Who are you?' now I ask, 'Who am I?
More than anything, it was ignorance that delivered conviction beyond the pale of disputation. Ignorance of questions. Ignorance of alternatives. No tyranny was so complete as blindness.
While waiting for the hidden machinery of messengers and secretaries to relay his request, Achamian wandered into an adjoining courtyard, struck by the other immensities that framed his present circum...
Where the holy take men for fools, the mad take the world. —
Where power was perceived, power was given. For his entire life Conphas had been surrounded by tutors.
What is practicality but one moment betrayed for the next? —
What did they know of motherhood, the mad miracle of finding your interior drawn from you, clinging and bawling and giggling and learning everything there was to learn anew?
What comes before determines what comes after, Kellhus continued. For the Dûnyain, there’s no higher principle. And just what comes before? Cnaiür asked, trying to force a sneer. For Men? History. Lan...
We must speak plainly. Only honesty provides truth. Only truth delivers triumph.
The world is a circle that possesses as many centres as it does men.
The vulgar think the God by analogy to man and so worship Him in the form of the Gods. The learned think the God by analogy to principles and so worship Him in the form of Love or Truth. But the wises...
The more crowded the concerns of the present, the more difficult it became to see the ways in which the past portended the future. Had
The Men of the Ordeal do not march to save the World, Proyas--at least not first and foremost. They march to save their wives and children. Their tribes and their nations. If they learn that the world...
Some events mark us so deeply that they find more force of presence in their aftermath than in their occurrence.
Sheltered by his caste, Sarcellus had not, as the impoverished must, made fear the pivot of his passions. As a result he possessed an immovable self-assurance. He felt. He acted. He judged. The fear o...
Maithanet carried a plague whose primary symptom was certainty. How the God could be equated with the absence of hesitation was something Achamian had never understood. After all, what was the God but...