Tigana

In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.

Devin had never trusted the priests of Eanna in his whole life. They were too shrewd, by far the most subtle of the clergy, by far the most apt to steer events to their own ends, which might lie out of sight, generations away. Servants of a goddess, he supposed, might find it easier to take the longer view of things. But everyone knew that all across the peninsula the clergy of the Triad had their own triple understanding with the Tyrants from abroad: their collective silence, their tacit complicity, bought in exchange for being allowed to preserve the rites that mattered more to them, it seemed, than freedom in the Palm.

Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.

It was true, it was all true. But none of it was the truth.

Music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of mind.

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.

“The Tyrants have cleaned out most of the highway brigands. Just a matter of protecting their own interests. They want to make sure no one else robs us before they do with their border tariffs and taxes.” He spat, discreetly, into the dust of the road. “Personally I preferred the brigands. There were ways of dealing with them.”

A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once...We can never truly know the path we have not walked.

Home was a dream she’d had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea.

He didn’t think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old.

When power is gone the memory of power lingers.

I suppose being right will have to compensate me for being poor—the story of my life, I fear.