Earthborn

Don't you hate it when somebody knows you better than you know yourself?

The doctrine he was going to be teaching, starting tonight, was not the sort of ideology that would stir souls; no one would die for this religion. It would only attracts converts by promising a return to old tradition and by seeming to be the religion of the future.

They won't be required to sacrifice anything in order to belong to your assembly. A religion that is all sweetness, but no light; all form, but no substance; all tradition, but no precept.

Which is the greater wrong? To hurt the unforgiving one, or hurt the one who has forgiven all?

That's one of those questions, whether human beings are really capable of change, or if all seeming changes are really a matter of framing the existing character in a different moral situation.

It occurred to me that if my friends were loathsome, perhaps I needed to learn from my enemies.

You always do that. Make all the questions harder.

I make them truer.

Just because you know I had no other choice doesn't make the anger go away. I understand that. But you're a man now. You can put away these childish things.

Law can change how people behave when others are watching — that's all.

Wanting to is the whole lesson; all the rest is practice.

Out of respect for custom he treats me as if all women were equally worthless. He gives custom more respect than he gives me.

He isn't insane, he's simply as trapped in his life as I am in mine. That makes us friends.

Humans, in order to rise above the animals, had learned how to convert themselves into nothing more than organs or limbs or even disposable fingernails and hair of a larger metaphorical organism.

We can wash people in the water all we want, but we can never wash their parents out of their hearts.

I believe in everything that seems true to me right now. I just refuse to be surprised when some of those things I believe in now turn out to be false later.

Only boys were so foolish that they actually believed their arguments were their reasons.

I'll be dead and you'll think about this day and wonder which of us was more the slave, you or me!

Boys always argued as if they knew then had the forces of logic on their side, even when they were being completely irrational.

What difference does it make, whether we keep our silence because [they] force us or because we're afraid they might force us?

Most of the things people say they remember they only imagine anyways.

Today, I saw a spark of decency. Let's blow on that spark and give it fuel.

Maybe if I could bear my life as it is for one day, for one hour, for one minute, I could forget my wish to be something else.

If a father commands a son to commit a crime so terrible that the son can't do it and live with himself, then is it betrayal for the son to disobey his father?

I have no secret thoughts... Or rather, they're not secret because I've withheld them — if they're unknown, it's because no one asked.

We all choose our own teachers, don't we? I wonder if our choice of teacher shows anything about what our lives will be.