it's only temporary

“If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?”

The boundlessness of space nurtured a dark new humanity in its dark embrace.

Now he saw only the stars and the headstones, the two greatest symbols of eternity.

"... I thought that life was truly an accident among accidents in the universe. The universe was an empty palace, and humankind the only ant in the entire palace. This kind of thinking infused the second half of my life with a conflicted mentality: Sometimes I thought life was precious, and everything was so important; but other times I thought humans were insignificant, and nothing was worthwhile. Anyway, my life passed day after day accompanied by this strange feeling, and before I knew it, I was old..."

Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness—a dynamic, indifferent world.

I walk along the lower balconies where night mist beads on the stone walls. The waves crash all around the roots of the building. Both were made by man. Perhaps at first in hope, to give our species a new home to live and to love. But in time, I don't know when, their creation became a vanity of will, and in the shadow of that vanity, man grew lesser for having more. Lesser for mastering the keys of creation, because he mistook himself for god, and cared less for his people, and more that his works endured. Have I done the same?

“Tell me, what is the purpose of victory if it destroys us?”

The key to learning, to power, to having the final say in everything, is observation. By all means, be a storm inside, but save your movement and wind till you know your purpose.

Zero. Mass. Transport. This is supposed to be a civilized space station, in space, why the fuck am I driving a ground vehicle to get to a fucking port on a fucking— (Emotion check: I am absolutely fine.)

She hadn't been foolish or resentful or any of the things Farai had considered, just... trusting. Of an adult human who should have been taking care of her.

…Three looked at me and said, "Perihelion-drone is angry that I didn't follow the plan."

Yeah, I bet. "You know that's a you problem."

"Oh." Three was disconcerted. Welcome to the consequences of your actions, Three. It said hopefully, "It can't be a we problem?"

"No, it can't," I said. "Get in the shuttle."

Or has he been doomed since before his birth? Doomed through a thousand incarnations to know little else but sadness and struggle, loneliness and remorse—eternally the champion of some unknown cause?

Justice was not obtained, he believed, by administration but by experience. One must know what it was to suffer humiliation and powerlessness; at least to some degree, before one could entirely appreciate its effect. One must give up power if one was to achieve true justice.

"The struggle between Law and Chaos echoes that struggle within ourselves between unbridled emotion and too much caution, I suppose," Elric mused…

“…legends in themselves have no power. The power comes from the uses that the living make of the legend. The legends merely represent an ideal."

Truth has no witness? being isn't knowing? If a person doesn't look and doesn't see, does the truth exist anyway? The truth that doesn't transmit itself even to those who can see. Is that the secret of being a person?

…in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and fire that is the breathing of the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.

And the hell is not the torture of pain! it is the torture of a joy.

But now, that I knew that my joy had been suffering, I was wondering if I was fleeing toward a God because I couldn't stand my humanity.

Nature, what I liked about nature, was its vibrating inexpressiveness.

I am not speaking of the future, I am speaking of a permanent present. And that means that hope does not exist because it is no longer a postponed future, it is today. Because the God does not promise. He is much greater than that: He is, and never stops being. We are the ones who cannot stand this always present light, and so we promise it for later, just in order not to feel it today, right this very minute.

Was the secret of never escaping from the greater life living like a sleepwalker? Or was living like a sleepwalker the greatest act of trust? closing one's eyes in dizziness, and never knowing what went on.

Am I speaking of death? no, of life. It is not a state of happiness, it is a state of contact.

And I wonder, in my last moments, if the planet does not mind that we wound her surface or pillage her bounty, because she knows we silly warm things are not even a breath in her cosmic life. We have grown and spread, and will rage and die. And when all that remains of us is our steel monuments and plastic idols, her winds will whisper, her sands will shift, and she will spin on and on, forgetting about the bold, hairless apes who thought they deserved immortality.

In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that's left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines.

It takes more to hope than to remember.

“We are not our station in life. We are us—the sum of what we've done, what we want to do, and the people who we keep close.”

“In a world of killers, it takes more to be kind than to be wicked.”

I hope Andy is down there. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.

But maybe there is something about what the Germans did that exercises a deadly fascination over us—something that opens the catacombs of the imagination. Maybe part of our dread and horror comes from a secret knowledge that under the right—or wrong—set of circumstances, we ourselves would be willing to build such places and staff them.

Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant, did you ever notice that? But when I think of that dream, the corpses under the water pulling implacably at my legs, it seems right that it should be that way. Some people drown, that's all. It's not fair, but it happens. Some people drown.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away.

So how do you build a life under the threat of extinction?

"There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. It's hard to live in all those kinds of time. Easy to forget that you live in all of them."

But this, I realized, was the faith that had deserted me. The faith in Big Salvation… It was a honeyed lie. A paper lifeboat, even if we were killing ourselves trying to cling to it. It wasn't the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation.

You have my word—it's a simple phrase, and easy on the lips; my word is nothing more than what I am, and it's broken as easily as men are. But it's also nothing less than what I am, and it has the same lust for survival that I do. I spread my hands in a disparaging shrug. "What would my word mean?" A rhetorical question. "It would place no chains upon my arms that could prevent the raising of my fist."