...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, unto...
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...
And we convict almost every case, she thinks, because the law requires us to prosecute them for living their way of life.
Humans are strange. … They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that are important. … it's vanity.
The gods are cruel not because they make us work. They are cruel because they allow us to hope.
Humanity's relationship with the Divine is one of mutual give and take, and we mutually opted to part ways. But this perpetuation - setting up a way of thinking, and just letting it run - it doesn't always yield good results.
I don't have the time or the energy to hate,' says Shara. 'I only wish to understand. People are what they are.
...history, as you may know, is much like a spiral staircase that gives the illusion of going up, but never quite goes anywhere.
We all reconstruct our past because we wish to see how our present came to be our present - do we 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.
History will not let us forget: it wears disguises, reintroduces itself to us, claims it is someone new and wonderful. But let us not forget.
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.
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.
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 i...
One has no room for vengeance,' says Shara, 'when the eyes of the world are watching. We must be judicious, and bloodless.
I learned very early on not to speak to my folk from on high, but to get down with them, beside them, showing them how to act rather than telling them. And I suggested that they should do the same with one another: that they didn't need a book of rul...
Life is full of beautiful dangers, dangerous beauties... They wound us in ways we cannot see: an injury ripples out, like a stone dropped in water, touching moments years into the future.
Miracles are just formal requests, Shara thinks wildly. It's like having a form preprinted and filled out and handing it in to get exactly what you want! But you don't always have to do it that way! You can make it up as you go along, so long as you ...
