Empire of Silence

My memory is to the world as a drawing is to the photograph. Imperfect. More perfect. We remember what we must, what we choose to, because it is more beautiful and real than the truth.

It is a mistake to believe we must know a thing to be influenced by it. It is a mistake to believe the thing must even be real.

The man who hopes for the future delays its arrival, and the man who dreads it summons it to his door.

The fool believes the iniquities of the world are the fault of other men. Gibson’s voice, dry as old manuscript pages, had never been more clear. The truly wise try to change themselves, which is the more difficult and less grand task.

Atrocity is writ by quiet men in council chambers over crystal glasses of cool water. Strange little men with ashes in their hearts. Sans passion, sans hope… sans everything. Everything but fear.

But the truth is poor poetry

Augustine once said that if there are such things as the past and the future, they do not exist as such but are only the present in their own times. The past, he says, exists only in memory and the future only in expectation. Neither is real.

We live in stories, and in stories, we are subject to phenomena beyond the mechanisms of space and time. Fear and love, death and wrath and wisdom, these are as much part of our universe as light and gravity.

A single death, wrote one ancient king, is a tragedy, but a genocide can only be understood through statistics.

The world’s soft the way the ocean is. Ask any sailor what I mean. But even when it is at its most violent, Hadrian . . . focus on the beauty of it. The ugliness of the world will come at you from all sides. There’s no avoiding it. All the schooling in the universe won’t stop that.

Dangerous things, names. A kind of curse, defining us that we might live up to them, or giving us something to run away from.

I do not consider myself a great artist, though she made me wish I was. I could not have known at this first meeting how many times I would fail to capture her, in charcoal and in life. The brazen declaration of her; the pride in that upturned chin, the pointed nose, and the tidy carelessness that put her above the opinions of lesser men. There's little sign of her wit-so close to cruelty-in any of the drawings I made of her, and this poor prose cannot contain her beauty, body or soul. They are only echoes, as is this.

Knowledge is the mother of fools,” he said. “Remember, the greatest part of wisdom is in recognizing your own ignorance.

Sift the sand of every world and sort the dust of space between them, and you will find not one atom of fear, nor gram of love nor dram of hatred. Yet they are there, unseen and uncertain as the smallest quanta and just as real.

Civilization is a kind of prayer: that by right action we might bring to pass the peace and quiet that is the ardent desire of every decent heart.

As the ancient sea was cruel, so too is that blacker sea, vaster by far, that fills the void between the suns like water.

Fear is the death of reason...and reason the death of fear.

The artist sees things not in terms of what is or might be, but in terms of what must be. Of what our world must become. This is why a portrait will—to the human observer—always defeat the photograph.

The frightened man eats himself

I have had many names. During the war, I was Hadrian Halfmortal and Hadrian the Deathless. After the war, I was the Sun Eater. To the poor people of Borosevo, I was a myrmidon called Had. To the Jaddians, I was Al Neroblis. To the Cielcin, I was Oimn Belu

Atrocity is writ by quiet men in council chambers over crystal glasses of cool water. Strange little men with ashes in their hearts. Sans passion, sans hope . . . sans everything. Everything but fear. For themselves, for their own lives, for some imagined future. And in the name of safety, security, piety, they labor to found future heaven on present horror. But their kingdom of heaven is in the mind, in the future that will never be, and their present horrors are real.

I have stopped believing that it is up to any man to decide what other men deserve. I have met saints punished for their virtues and monsters praised for their monstrosity. I have been both sorts of creature.

Joy is a wind, Hadrian. It will pick you up only to smash you against the rocks again.

Let us move to the only beginning I’ve a right to: my own.

The practiced ear could hear the calculation behind every word like fishhooks in the mind.

Ignoring a thing is not ignorance, and he who holds his silence is an accomplice every time.

And in every age there is a stigma attached to extreme intelligence

Have you ever been made to contemplate your death? Locked in a tower cell, perhaps, or in some bastille of the Chantry to await your end on the edge of the White Sword? Have you ever sat there through a sleepless night and counted the seconds you have left like grains of sand? I pray that you have not. It is one thing to die and quite another to have suffered the fear of death and survive. I wish neither for you, who has suffered both. You stand as does the solitary candle in chapel, flickering against the Dark. A darkness not of space but of time, of the yawning maw of some empty, echoing future forever barred to you. It is comforting to know the sun will always rise--that is, until it does not, until it dissolves into cold ash and the universe runs down, or you do. Fire fades. And life. Or it is snuffed out. For the chapel candle, that is no tragedy--the candle knows not when it is extinguished. It is only a symbol, only the avatar of the unconquered sun lit to keep watch through the night in the Chantry temple. But the human flame knows, and it shivers not from wind but from fear. From the sickness of the heart. And so I shivered in my cloying bed and on the floor besides it when I could lie amongst its folds no more. Though I was but one score and three years--next to nothing compared to the centuries I have since counted--I felt my age and the specter of my fleeting mortality. I felt the ache in every once-broken bone, felt every scar from every would healed on the street and in the Colosso.

Focus blurs, Gibson used to say. Focus blinds. You must take in all of a thing by seeing the totality of it, not by focusing on minutiae. This is as important for a ruler as it is for a painter.

Fear is death to reason.