Heaven Queen, carry me
away from all pain.

All the same, take me away,
we're dead to the world.

Heaven Queen, cover me
in all that blue.

Little boy, such precious joy,
is dead to the world.


-Nightwish

In this chapel,
little chapel of love
can't we
get a little grace and
some elegance?
No, we scream in
cathedrals.

Why can't it be beautiful?

Why does there gotta be a sacrifice?


-Tori Amos








.

Cristoforo watched from his palace as eight hundred Caribian ships set sail for the new world, carrying his first two sons on their different missions there. He watched as another hundred and fifty ships set forth in groups of three or four or five to carry ambassadors and traders to every port of Europe and to every city of the Muslims. He watched as ambassadors and princes, great traders and scholars and churchmen came to Ciudad Isabella to teach the Caribians and learn from them.

Surely God had fulfilled the promises made on that beach near Lagos. Because of Cristoforo the word of God was being carried to millions. Kingdoms had fallen at his feet, and the wealth that had passed through his hands, under his control, was beyond anything he could have conceived of as a child in Genova. The weaver’s son who had once cowered in fear at the cruel doings of great men had become one of the greatest of all, and had done it without cruelty. On his knees Cristoforo gave thanks many times for God’s goodness to him.

--OSC.  Pastwatch:  The Redemption of Christopher Colombus



“I always thought: Hunahpu will be proud of me for doing this. Was that disloyal of me? To look forward to the day when I could show you my work?”
“Who else but you would understand what I achieved? Who else but me could know how far beyond our dreams you succeeded?”
“We changed the world,” she said.
“For now, anyway,” said Hunahpu. “They can still find their own ways to make all the old mistakes.”
She shrugged.
“Did you tell him?” asked Hunahpu. “About who we are, and where we came from?”
“As much as he could understand. He knows that I’m not an angel, anyway. And he knows that there was another version of history, in which Spain destroyed the Caribian people. He wept for days, once he understood.”

--OSC.  Pastwatch:  The Redemption of Christopher Colombus



I ushered souls into the next world. I was the grave of all hope. I was the ultimate reality. I was the assassin against whom no lock would hold.
 
"Yes, point taken, but do you have any particular skills?"

--Terry Pratchett

The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sail-less and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.

-Iain M. Banks








.

He let go of her hand and reached down beside the bench. When he straightened up he held a small red blossom in his hand. "Do you remember the flower I made for you? The first day you showed me how your virtual world worked?"

"Of course." She could not help staring at the petals, slightly ragged along one edge where something small had chewed them, at their rich, red, velvety color, even at the golden pollen smudged against !Xabbu's brown wrist. "It was very nice."

"I did not make this one," he said. "It is real and it will die. But we can still look at it together, in this moment. That is something, is it not?"

-Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

Don’t leave me alone at this time,
For I am afraid of what I will discover inside
You told me that I would find a hole,
Within the fragile substance of my soul
And I have filled this void with things unreal,
And all the while my character it steals

Darkness is a harsh term don't you think?

-Mumford and Sons, Roll Away Your Stone
















Listen, son. Most women are damn fools and children. But they've got more range than we've got. The brave ones are braver, the good ones are better — and the vile ones are viler, for that matter.

-Robert Heinlein, Puppet Masters







.

The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They've heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know."

"Then they get a taste of battle."

"For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they've been gutted by an axe."

"They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that's still half healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water."

"If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron half-helm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the small-folk whose lands they're fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it's just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don't know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they're fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world..."

"And the man breaks."

"He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them . . . but he should pity them as well."

When Meribald was finished a profound silence fell upon their little band. Brienne could hear the wind rustling through a clump of pussy-willows, and farther off the faint cry of a loon. She could hear Dog panting softly as he loped along beside the septon and his donkey, tongue lolling from his mouth. The quiet stretched and stretched, until finally she said, "How old were you when they marched you off to war?"

"Why, no older than your boy," Meribald replied. "Too young for such, in truth, but my brothers were all going, and I would not be left behind. Willam said I could be his squire, though Will was no knight, only a potboy armed with a kitchen knife he'd stolen from the inn. He died upon the Stepstones, and never struck a blow. It was fever did for him, and for my brother Robin. Owen died from a mace that split his head apart, and his friend Jon Pox was hanged for rape."

"The War of the Ninepenny Kings?" asked Hyle Hunt.

"So they called it, though I never saw a king, nor earned a penny. It was a war, though. That it was."

-George RR Martin

"He would rather lose his power for doing right, than keep his power by doing wrong. Because he loves his people more than he loves his office."

-Orson Scott Card, Stone Tablets














There is thy gold, worse poison to men's souls, Doing more murders in this loathsome world, than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.

-Romeo and Juliet


















There's no place it won't catch up with you.  It's how every story ends.  It's what you are, Jason.
A killer. You always will be.   Go on, do it.

-The Bourne Supremacy, film version


















"We are an insignificant life-form in a small solar system at the edge of an unimportant galaxy. A bubble of order and reason floating in the midst of a vast Chaos. A tiny aberration that has been allowed to continue only because those powerful enough to destroy us have had other and greater concerns."

"This is the thing," said Belinda Singer, "That Camber Tremodian told me, on that day in 1999: that there is no order to the universe, and no reason, and no cause. We are alone and outnumbered--"

Her eyes met his. In the first light of morning, in an imaginary world sixty-nine years before his birth and instants before her death, Belinda Singer said to Trent the Uncatchable "--and the universe is a far more dangerous place than anyone has ever told you."

-Daniel Keys Moran, The Last Dancer

When the bells justle in the tower
  The hollow night amid,
Then on my tongue the taste is sour
  Of all I ever did.
 
--A.E. Housman











 "So maybe I'm wrong. But look at Bonzo, your old commander. He's got an advanced case of Spanish honor. He can't allow himself to have weaknesses. To be better than him, that's an insult. To be stronger, that's like cutting off his  balls. That's why he hates you, because you didn't suffer when he tried to punish you. He hates you for that, he honestly wants to kill you. He's crazy. They're all crazy."

  "And you aren't?"

  "I be crazy too, little buddy, but at least when I be craziest, I be floating all alone in space and the crazy, she float out of me, she soak into the walls, and she don't come out till there be battles and little boy's bump into the walls and squish out de crazy."


.


 

  "Actually they promoted me twice, and I refused."

   "Refused?"
 
   "They took away my old locker and bunk and desk, assigned me to a commander cabin and gave me an army. But I just stayed in the cabin until they gave in and put me back into somebody else's army."
 
   "Why?"
 
   "Because I won't let them do it to me. I can't believe you haven't seen through all this crap yet, Ender. But I guess you're young. These other armies, they aren't the enemy. It's the teachers, they're the enemy. They get us to fight each other, to hate each other. The game is everything. Win win win, it amounts to nothing. We kill ourselves, go crazy trying to beat each other, and all the time the old bastards are watching us, studying us, discovering our weak points, deciding whether we're good enough or not. Well, good enough for what? I was six years old when they brought me here. What the hell did I know? They decided I was right for the program, but nobody ever asked me if the program was right for me."

   "So why don't you go home?"
 
   Dink smiled crookedly. "Because I can't give up the game." He tugged at the fabric of his flash suit, which lay on the bunk beside him. "Because I love this."


-Dink and Ender discuss enemies, Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game











Well, I'm your man.  I'm the bloody bastard you wanted when you had me spawned.  I'm your tool, and what difference does it make if I hate the part of me that you most need?  What difference does it make that when the little serpents killed me in the game, I agreed with them, and was glad. 

-O.S.Card, Ender's Game





.

'Oh, sick I am to see you, will you never let me be?
You may be good for something but you are not good for me.
Oh, go where you are wanted, for you are not wanted here.'
And that was all the farewell when I parted from my dear.
 
I will go where I am wanted, to a lady born and bred
Who will dress me free for nothing in a uniform of red;
She will not be sick to see me if I only keep it clean:
I will go where I am wanted for a soldier of the Queen.
 
I will go where I am wanted, for the sergeant does not mind;
He may be sick to see me but he treats me very kind:
He gives me beer and breakfast and a ribbon for my cap,
And I never knew a sweetheart spend her money on a chap.
 
I will go where I am wanted, where there's room for one or two,
And the men are none too many for the work there is to do;
Where the standing line wears thinner and the dropping dead lie thick;
And the enemies of England they shall see me and be sick.

--A. E. Housman, XXXIV - THE NEW MISTRESS