Robert Jackson Bennett Famous Quotes
Reading Robert Jackson Bennett quotes, download and share images of famous quotes by Robert Jackson Bennett. Righ click to see or save pictures of Robert Jackson Bennett quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.
Assume nothing. You do not know until you know.
In my operational days, there were three ways of thinking about things. There were things you knew. Then there were things you knew you didn't know. And then there were the things you didn't know that you didn't know." "No wonder we keep having so many international crises," she says, "if you lot are running around talking like that.
I am lost among the seas of fate and time
But at least I have love.
One day you'll know. And understand. You'll figure yourself out. And things will be all right
Deserve.' How preoccupied we are with that. With what we should have, with what we are owed. I wonder if any word has ever caused more heartache.
What a foreign concept it is to die, to cough up what you are as if it is no more than mucus pooled at the back of your throat, and perish.
In Shara's estimation, lists form one half of the heart of intelligence, the second half being patience. Most espionage work, after all, is a matter of collecting data and categorizing it: who belongs to which group, and why; where are they now, and how are we sure, and do we have someone else in the region; and now that we have cataloged those groups, what threat level should they be categorized under; and so on, and so on, and so on.
I wonder, sometimes, if the Continentals were like shoals of fish, & the slightest flick of one fish caused dozens of others to follow suit, until the entire shimmering cloud had changed course.
And were the Divinities the sum of this cloud? An embodiment, perhaps, of a national subconscious? Or were they empowered by the thoughts & praises of millions of people, yet also yoked to every one of those thoughts – giant, terrible puppets forced to dance by the strings of millions of puppeteers.
This knowledge, I think, is incredibly dangerous. The Continentals derive so much pride & so much power from having Divine approval … but were they merely hearing the echoes of their own voices, magnified through strange caverns & tunnels? When they spoke to the Divinities, were they speaking to giant reflections of themselves?
With his right hand Sigrud holds the remains of the ballroom chandelier - which has apparently been ripped out of the ceiling - and he is using it to fend off another attacker, who attempts to engage him with a sword. But though it is hard to tell through all the glimmering crystals flying through the air, the attacker appears to be steadily losing, stumbling back with every blow, in between which Sigrud, using the fist holding the chandelier, manages to pummel the face of the unhappy man in his headlock.
Wishing is bad," he said again. "It makes you hurt. Makes all the missing parts hurt, makes them open up new and makes them bleed."
xxx
"You take out a part of you," Roosevelt murmured. "Take it out and blow on it and toss it to the winds like dust, and you say, 'Find all the missing parts of me. Go out among the world and find the missing parts of me.' But instead of getting back what you lost you just lose more. Wishing is bad. Wish long enough and there won't be any of you left.
And then he understands: it's a loop, an endless loop of injured children, growing old but keeping their pain fresh and new, causing yet more injury and starting the whole cycle over again.
Good historians keep the past in their head and the future in their heart.
My first question is- do you have a name?
"A name? Yes."
"Ah!" said the wolf. It wrote several extensive notes. "And what is that name?"
"George."
"I see," said the wolf. "And how long have you been George?"
"How long? As in, how long have I been alive?"
"oh, were you here in some way before you were alive?" asked the wolf, interested.
"I...don't really know," said George. " I don't think so."
"So you don't know if you were here? Or if you were here before your George-time? Is it possible for you to be here, bu not know it?"
"My what time? no, I mean, I was born, and then they just named me George."
"So you are not George," said the wolf. George is just a name. A word. A propulsion of air modified by the flexing of throat parts."
"Well, I am George, but...yes. Yes, and...no."
"Is it possible that you became George at a later time, having been originally named that thing?" asked the wolf. " What if the naming had been different, would you still be George?"
"I...yes?"
"Really?" breathed the wolf in awe. "This is all so confusing." Yet he seemed very pleased with George's answers. " I don't know how you all do it. It seems so marvelously complex to simply...be.
Assume nothing, Shara reminds herself. You do not know until you know.
Historians, I think, should be keepers of truth. We must tell things as they are - honestly, and without subversion. That is the greatest good one can do.
It all tears away from us," he says, "like paper.
He's not sure how all the cowboys stay so good-looking in the movies when the country is so openly hostile to sartorial maintenance.
The sort of people who intermittently review their children, she thinks, rather than raise them.
Shara realizes she herself has done this to her own enemies many times: after all, why kill someone when you can make them out to be an incompetent fool?
They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important - that they are important. You don't get punished for doing something unimportant, after all.
Why are you out here risking your life? Is Justice such an odd thing to desire? Justice is a luxury. No said Gregor. It is not. It is a right. And it is a right that has long been denied. He stared out at the city...I would shed every drop of blood in my body for such a thing.
The gods are cruel not because they make us work. They are cruel because they allow us to hope.
We are - or were - Divinities, Shara Komayd: we drew power from the hearts and minds and beliefs of a people. But that which you draw power from, you are also powerless before ... A people believe in a god ... and the god tells them what to believe.
What books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves ... Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.
Sometimes I can't tell if you hate this place or love it."
"I love its potential. I hate its past. And I don't like what it is." She hugs her knees close to her chest. "The way you feel about the place you grew up in is a lot like how you feel about your family."
"How's that?"
She thinks about it for a long time. "Like isn't the same thing as love.
Time has a way of returning all heedlessness to those who commit it ... even if they are Divine.
Shara now sits on committees that decide who shall be nominated to be committee chairs for other committees; then, after these meetings, she sits on committee meetings to formulate agendas for future meetings; and after these, she attends committee meetings deciding who shall be appointed to appoint appointments to committees.
Die. Do you think I will? I suppose I must...I exist now, and everything that exists must end, one day. I wonder how I will die, and what it will be like. It will be most interesting, don't you think? [...] Yes. Yes, I think it will," said the wolf. "I look forward to it. On the whole, I think it is a very strange and terrifying thing, to exist. I really don't understand how you do it. Tell me - how do you deal with the fear?
"The fear?" asked George.
"Yes. That fear that comes from the feeling that there is you, and then there is...everything else. That you are trapped inside of yourself, a tiny dot insignificant in the face of every everything that could ever be. How do you manage that?"
George considered how to answer. "I...guess we just never think about it."
"Never think about it!" cried the wolf. "How can you not think about it when it confronts you at every moment? You are lost amid a wide, dark sea, with no shores in sight, and you all so rarely panic! Some days I can barely function, so how on earth can you never think about it?"
"Well, I...suppose we distract ourselves," said George.
"But with what?".
"I don't know. With all kinds of things.
The world may not go on forever. But that does not mean we cannot try to make tomorrow better.
I know vaudeville isn't supposed to be art. It's supposed to be entertainment, which is different. But I think art ... I think it's making something from nothing, basically. It's taking something as simple as movement, or a few notes, or steps, or words, and putting them all together so that they're bigger than what they ever could have been separate. They're transformed. And just witnessing that transformation changes you. It reaches into your insides and moves things around. It's magic, of a sort.
I never really knew that until I saw your act. But when you walked out on that stage, I knew I was seeing something ... different. Something maybe more amazing than what the professor and Silenus had done. You were making something up there, out of just the simplest elements possible, and seeing it changed something in me. I'd never encountered anything like that.
In retrospect they might have started sleeping together solely out of conversational exhaustion.
He remembers looking up in his jail cell and seeing a needle of sunlight poking through, and trying to cradle that tiny pinhole of light in his hands.
I survived. I keep surviving, it seems. It's taught me many things. After Dantua…it was like a magic spell had been lifted from my eyes. We are making these horrors. We are doing this to ourselves. We have to change. We must change.
The soul might be within the eyes, but the subconscious, the matter of their behavior; that is in the hands. Watch a man's hands, and you watch his heart.
Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves ... Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.
She felt overwhelmed. It was
she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library
a lot like being in love for the first time.
Having you is different from loving you.
She did not think it was love. She did not think it was love when she felt a curious ache and anxiety when he was not there; she did not think it was love as she felt relief wash over her when she received a note from him; she did not think it was love when she sometimes wondered what their lives would be like after five, ten, fifteen years together. The idea of love never crossed her mind.
Why is it, she thought, that people always leave us just before we know them?
So many systems, so many pieces ... more complicated than the most complicated of clocks. I wonder, sometimes: are we truly one thing, one being, or many, many different things, simply dreaming they are one?
But that which you draw power from, you are also powerless before.
It is not hard to believe that this is the land that birthed the nuclear age: anything feels possible out here.
And was it her imagination, but did the lump in her back move just a little as the boys' team emerged from the shadow of a willow and broke into sunlight?
As if having you by force was the same as having you.
I put my office right in the middle of the death they threaten us with. [ ... ] here I sit, every day, hanging over all this wasted nothing. I will never forget what the world could be, should my vigilance never fail. And more than that, I will never forget that in a way we are all hanged men and hanged women, awaiting those deaths which cannot be avoided. Yet I will make sure that we live and die the way we choose for as long as we possibly can.
The more you are at sea,' Sigrud explains, 'the more you learn. And the more you learn, the more help and assistance is a troublesome bother. Dealing death, after all, is a solitary affair.
It was toward the middle part of their relationship, though neither she nor Vohannes knew it then. She had found him sitting beneath a tree, watching the rowing team practicing in the Khamarda River, next to the academy. The girls' team had just set their shell in the water and was climbing in. When Shara joined him and sat in his lap, as she often did, she felt a soft lump pressing into her lower back.
When in doubt, be patient, and watch.
If one were to protest all the injustices of life," says Sigrud, "great and small, one would have no time for living.
One day Nola came into school wearing a set of incredibly thick glasses, and though they did no favors to her appearance, Nola was ecstatic: she could see all kinds of things now, things she'd never known were even there. She'd had no idea trees were so pretty, she said. She could see every single leaf waving in the wind now. For some reason, this terrified young Mona. It wasn't that Nola's vision had changed: it was that her vision had changed without her even knowing it. There were all kinds of things happening around her that she'd never known about, that she was blind to. Though her experience of the world had seemed whole and certain to her, in truth it had been marred, filled with blind spots, and she'd had no idea.
No, you aren't sorry. You are a representative of your country. And countries do not feel sorrow.
Somewhere around mile three on the trek up the hill Pitry Suturashni decides he would not describe the Javrati sun as "warm and relaxing," as all the travel advertisements say. Nor would he opt to call the breezes here "a cool caress upon the neck." And he certainly would not call the forests "fragrant and exotic." In fact, as Pitry uselessly mops his brow for the twentieth time, he decides he would rather describe the sun as "a hellish inferno," the breezes as "absolutely nonexistent," and the forests as "full of things with far too many teeth and a great desire to apply them to the human body.
Why is it," says Vohannes as he walks her to the door, "that whenever we finish our business, it feels like neither of us got what we wanted?" "Perhaps we conduct the wrong sort of business.
Is it sleep you want to find?" he asks quietly. "Or dreams you wish to escape?" She
I wished to be an artist," Ivanya confides to Shara. "But it simply didn't turn out that way. I didn't have the ... I'm not sure. The imagination, I suppose, or the ambition, or both. You have to be a bit outside things to make something new, but I was always very much inside things.
Old texts say many things. You say these things as though they are special
as if it is unusual for one person to see another in pain, and wish to help. As if, he says quietly, to do the extraordinary
or what you think is extraordinary
a person must be told to do so, by the Divine.
She devoted her life to this place, this work. If that doesn't make a home, Turyin Mulaghesh, then nothing does.
Time renders all peope and all things silent. But I will speak of you, of all of you, for all the time I have.
A people believe in a god' - she completes the circle -' and the god tells them what to believe. It's a cycle, like water flowing into the ocean, then up to the skies, and into rain, which falls and flows into the ocean. But it is different in that ideas have weight. They have momentum. Once an idea starts, it spreads and grows and gets heavier and heavier until it can't be resisted, even by the Divine.
Warfare is light. Warfare and conflict are the energies with which this world functions. To claim otherwise is to claim your very veins are not filled with blood, to claim that your heart is still and silent. You knew this once. Once in the hills of this country you understood that to wage war was to be alive, to shed blood was to bask in the light of the sun.
There is nothing worse than an opponent who is suddenly revealed to be understanding and compassionate.
Voters might have short memories. Politicians do not.
I don't think we can build much of a future,' says Shara, 'without knowing the truth of the past. It's time to be honest about what the world really was, and what it is now.
The older you get, the more voices you get in the back of your head.
xxx it feels to me that...that death is but a thunderstorm. Just wind and noise. You can't ask meaning of such a thing. Not even of your own.
Killing echoes inside you. It never goes away. Maybe some who have killed don't know that they've lost something, but they have.
It is nearly two o'clock in the morning, and Tom Bolan is ass-over-head, military-grade, wearing-more-booze-than-he's-ingesting drunk.
No one does. No one really knows how to be happy. You just get close, sometimes. That's all I want – just to be close.
Sigrud is a hammer in a world of nails, and he is satisfied knowing only that.
The word everyone forgets is 'serve' ... Yes. Serve. This is the service, and we soldiers are servants. Sure, when people think of a soldier, they think of soldiers taking. They think of us taking territory, taking the enemy, taking the city or a country, taking treasure, or blood. This grand, abstract idea of 'taking,' as if we were pirates, swaggering and brandishing our weapons, bullying and intimidating people. But a solider, a true soldier, I think, does not take. A soldier gives.
Do you not enslave people now?" asks the man. "Chains are forged of many strange metals. Poverty is one. Fear, another. Ritual and custom are yet more. All actions are forms of slavery, methods of forcing people to do what they deeply wish not to do.
Pitry regrets not defining the phrase "other side of the hill" more precisely. As he marches along the wandering paths, it increasingly feels like this hill keeps producing other sides out of nowhere for him, none of which bear any sign of civilization. At
She realized she'd been thinking for years that she would not truly be pleased until she'd checked off this last achievement on her list, but one of the dangers of such thinking is that the event one hopes for never quite lives up to the expectation.
Mrs. Benjamin does not precisely understand first aid, but she thinks she gets the general principles: things that are within the body must stay within at all times. If they do not stay in, they must be forced in, and kept there via things like gauze and sticky tape.
Is this survival? Is this liberty?
"Beats the hell out of me, kid," said Clef's voice, soft and sad.
I wish I did not know parts of the past; I wish they had never happened. But the past is the past, and someone must remember, and speak of it.
The world is a coward ... It does not change before your face; it waits until your back is turned, and pounces ...
I am penitent," says Vohannes. "I am penitent for all the relationships this shame has ruined. I am penitent that I've allowed my shame and unhappiness to spread to others. I've fucked men and I've fucked women, Father Kolkan. I have sucked numerous pricks, and I have had my prick sucked my numerous people. I have fucked and been fucked. And it was lovely, really lovely. I had an excellent time doing it, and I would gladly do it again. I really would." He laughs. "I have been lucky enough to find and meet and come to hold beautiful people in my arms - honestly, some beautiful, lovely, brilliant people - and I am filled with regret that my awful self-hate drove them away.
Lonely places draw lonely people ... They echo inside us, and we cannot help but listen.
When the world grinds you down, you pick a handful of fires to hold close to your heart.
You are wrong," says the man. His voice is low and resonant. The metal walls of the dome, all the knives and swords and spears, all seem to vibrate with each of his words. "Your rulers and their propaganda have sold you this watered-down conceit of war, of a warrior yoked to the whims of civilization. Yet for all their self-professed civility, your rulers will gladly spend a soldier's life to better aid their posturing, to keep the cost of a crude good low. They will send the children of others off to die and only think upon it later to grandly and loudly memorialize them, lauding their great sacrifice. Civilization is but the adoption of this cowardly method of murder.
Where the hell are you going?" says Bolan. "The trunk. Are we ... not putting her in the trunk?" "Why the fuck would we put her in the trunk?" says Mallory. "Well, that's usually where I put unconscious people," says Dord.
A 6-inch cannon. I've only ever seen those on a Saypuri dreadnought ... And it looks like they have, or expect to have, 36 of the damn things."
"And they plan to do what with them? Bombard the hills? Fight a war with the squirrels?
Density, matter, radiation ... it's all just construction paper and pipe cleaners and glue, with the proper perspective.
And if we were meant only to labor, why give us minds, why give us desires? Why can we not be as cattle in the field, or chickens in their coops?
One has no room for vengeance,' says Shara, 'when the eyes of the world are watching. We must be judicious, and bloodless.
Vohannes turns and grins at her. "So! Here is the triumphant warrior, fresh off of her conquest. What an epic night you've had!" "Vo, I honestly do not have time for your supposed charms. How did you get in?" "By liberally applying my supposed charms, of course," says Vohannes.
Shara was aware throughout that they were playing reversed roles, considering their nationalities: for she was the staunch, mistrustful conservative, zealously advocating the proper way of living and building a disciplined, useful life; and he was the permissive libertine, arguing that if someone wished to do something, and if it hurt no one, and moreover if they had the money to pay for it, then why should anyone interfere?
This is kind of a sticky situation, isn't it, Gurudas?" she says. "I told you two that if I caught either of you on my property again I'd expose a goodly amount of your innards to the fresh sea air. And I hate breaking promises. That's what whole of civilized society is founded upon, isn't it - promises?
So he steeled himself and sent a wordless, desperate cry for aid up into the sky, hoping it would pierce the roof of the jail and the mantle of clouds and the net of stars behind that, venturing out beyond to where nothingness had no claim and there might be some consciousness, some intelligence that would listen and understand and sympathize. Something, just something. But it seemed unlikely that anything so vast would notice or care.
He was so small. A little man scrambling across the wilderness, trying to make the cosmos pay attention and make sense. In that midnight belly of the jail, dawn was a memory and the sun was no more than a dream, and hope tasted more of a curse to him than a blessing.
The woman smiles. The smile is neither pleasant nor unpleasant: it is a smile like fine silver plate, used for one occasion and polished and put away once finished.
I have never met a person who possessed a privilege who did not exercise that privilege to the fullest extent that they possibly could.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, yadda yadda yadda.
Have never met a person who possessed a privilege who did not exercise that privilege to the fullest extent that they possibly could. Say what you like of a belief, of a party, of a finance system, of a power - all I see is privilege and its consequences.
Wink? she thinks. Where the fuck is Wink?
Remember - move thoughtfully, give freedom to others, and you'll rarely do wrong ...
When the auto arrives it's hard to believe there's a functional vehicle underneath all the mud and moss and sprays of gravel, which stick to the sides like barnacles on a ship.
Coffee refreshes the body," says Shara. "Tea refreshes the soul.
Scars are windows to bitterness - it is best to leave them untouched.
Every second is a forever in Wink. Every day is a cool afternoon waiting to happen. And every life is one lived quietly, with your feet up and your sun-dappled lawn before you as you watch the world happily drift by.
I want them worried. I want them to wonder if I am what I actually am.