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c218091
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That's the horrible fact of sinners. We're indistinguishable from the righteous.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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d457aa7
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A cut scarred where a caress faded away.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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f239c0f
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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 the mystery that burdened them all? What was hesitation but a dwelling-within this mystery? Perhaps,
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R. Scott Bakker |
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1deaad3
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Kings never lie. They demand the world be mistaken. --CONRIYAN PROVERB When
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R. Scott Bakker |
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a4c0134
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Given the manifest frailty of men, given the long succession of delusions that was their history, what could be more preposterous than claiming oneself the least deluded, let alone privy to the absolute?
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R. Scott Bakker |
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94c234f
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Like life, games were governed by rules. But unlike life, games were utterly defined by those rules. The rules were the game, and if one played by different rules, then one simply played a different game. Since a fixed framework of rules determined the meaning of every move as a move, games possessed a clarity that made life seen like a drunken brawl by comparison. The proprieties were indubitable, the permutations secure; only the outcome ..
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life
rules
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R. Scott Bakker |
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6469322
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Vulgar languages, especially when native, stand too close to the press of life. Their meanings are too easily warped by our insights and experiences. The sheer otherness of Gilcunya serves to insulate the semantics of sorcery from the inconstancies of our lives.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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1df30bc
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They worshipped themselves as the measure of all significance,
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R. Scott Bakker |
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923bbd8
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Where hopes burn bright," he said, "patience is quickly consumed."
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R. Scott Bakker |
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f0c9f76
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Ignorance is trust. --
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R. Scott Bakker |
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21dc347
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If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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d867469
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You realized those truths that cut against the interests of the powerful were called lies, and that those lies that served those interests were called truths.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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9f963c3
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We Dunyain, Cnaiur, are guides and trackers, students of the Logos, the Shortest Way. Of all the world, we alone have awakened from the dread slumber of custom. We alone." He drew Cnaiur's young hand to his lap. Thumbs probed the spaces between his calluses. How could bliss ache so? "Tell me, Chieftain-son, what do you desire before all things? What circumstance? Tell me, one who is awake, and I'll show you the trail you must follow." Cnai"
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R. Scott Bakker |
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5916b23
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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 because words have consequences, because voices move souls and souls move voices, a great radiation. This is why we so readily admit to corpses what we dare not confess to the living. This why only the executioner can speak without care of consequ..
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R. Scott Bakker |
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4b0576c
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Though all men be equally frail before the world, the differences between them are terrifying." --"
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R. Scott Bakker |
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e38d0bb
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few things are more familiar, he supposed, than finding oneself a stranger.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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3cfca26
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But I've always believed," Kellhus continued, "that one must ride another man's horse for a day before criticizing." "To better understand him?" "No," the man replied with an eye-twinkling shrug. "Because then you're a day away and you have his horse . . ." Achamian"
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R. Scott Bakker |
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de3697b
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Hope is ever the greatest luxury of the helpless, the capacity to suppose knowledge that circumstances denied.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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b09ab79
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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?
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R. Scott Bakker |
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9623dac
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To resent is to brood in inaction, to pass through life acting in a manner indistinguishable from those who bear no grudges. But hatred hails from a wilder, far more violent tribe. Even when you cannot strike out, you strike nonetheless. Inward, if not outward, as if such things have direction. To hate, especially without recourse to vengeance, is to besiege yourself, to starve yourself to the point of eating your own, then to lay wreaths o..
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R. Scott Bakker |
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9e3f3f2
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But you do understand. Think, Leweth. If we're nothing more than our thoughts and passions, and if our thoughts and passions are nothing more than movements of our souls, then we are nothing more than those who move us. Who you once were, Leweth, ceased to exist the moment your wife died.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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fb99387
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To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things. To be ignorant is to be a slave of the world. To be deceived is to be the slave of another man. The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so? --AJENCIS, THE EPISTEMOLOGIES
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R. Scott Bakker |
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135cbba
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Fools can be trusted precisely because they are fools. Their agendas rarely intersect with your own.
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trust
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R. Scott Bakker |
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0e1cf79
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Look unto others and ponder the sin and folly you find there. For their sin is your sin, and their folly is your folly. Seek ye the true reflecting pool? Look to the stranger you despise, not the friend you love.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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705d73e
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The Dunyain," 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 men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes befor..
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R. Scott Bakker |
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7667b4b
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The darkness was crisp, as though scraped of sight and smell by winter's razor.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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76c13b2
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The eyes of men were but pinholes...All their books, even their scriptures, were nothing more than pinholes. And yet, because they couldn't see what was unseen, they assumed they saw everything, they confused pinpricks with the sky.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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b91e558
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Stupid men, Conphas had found, tended to be excessively proud of their few brilliant moments.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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db0ed8d
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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.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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fa2ee05
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One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten. Heartbroken,
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R. Scott Bakker |
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7bd0c43
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Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke his conviction to his need -- to believe, absolutely, whatever his heart required. For Sorweel, belief and want always seemed like ropes too short to bind together, forcing him to play the knot as a result.
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philosophy
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R. Scott Bakker |
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f1df4e2
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We make a sad couple," she said, as though making a casual observation. "Why would you say that?" "A sorcerer and a harlot . . . There's something sad about that." He grasped her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers. "There's something sad about all couples," he said."
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R. Scott Bakker |
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8405ddf
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Zealous men often confuse purity with intolerance, particularly when they're young.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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1caee96
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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 them . . . They were unbearable at the best of times. With drink they became lunatic with misery. He
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R. Scott Bakker |
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c509431
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It ... It ... It is what it is!
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R. Scott Bakker |
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7d83020
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the hot glare of evening winked into the chill glow of dusk in a heartbeat
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R. Scott Bakker |
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580ac99
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And do Men despise ignorance?' I asked. 'No,' he said, 'they prize it above all things--all things!--but only so long as it remains invisible.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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0202249
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Small wonder, Thomas thought, we humans were so jumpy, so arrogant, so defensive. Small wonder the Internet, which was supposed to blow the doors off narrow, parochial views of the world, had simply turned into a supermarket of bigotries, a place where any hatred or hope could find bogus rationalization. For the human brain, it was like living in a schizophrenic world, a paradise of plenty where any second now, something really bad was goin..
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R. Scott Bakker |
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d41a23a
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Everyone thinks they've won the Magical Belief Lottery. Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow lucked into the one true belief system.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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6af2693
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All sorcerers had studied alchemy to some extent, and all alchemists, at least those worth their salt, knew how to cook.
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R. Scott Bakker |
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b60d6d0
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There's faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there's faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they're not entirely certain they're in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God's mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence . . .
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R. Scott Bakker |
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da67609
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Have you heard the saying, Skeaos? 'Cats look down upon Man, and dogs look up, but only pigs dare look Man straight in the eye.'" "Y-yes, God-of-Men." "Pretend that you are a pig, Skeaos." What"
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R. Scott Bakker |
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baf22e6
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What is practicality but one moment betrayed for the next? --
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R. Scott Bakker |
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ad0db47
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Die Welt ist ein Kreis, der so viele Mittelpunkte wie Bewohner hat.
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R. Scott Bakker |