Top 100 Robert Jackson Bennett Quotes
#1. And if we were meant only to labor, why give us minds, why give us desires? Why can we not be as cattle in the field, or chickens in their coops?
Robert Jackson Bennett
#2. Men always forget that human happiness is a disposition of mind and not a condition of circumstances. - John Locke
Robert Jackson Bennett
#3. The ship groans, moans, bangs, and clangs, miserably protesting this turn of events. 'I
Robert Jackson Bennett
#4. He's not sure how all the cowboys stay so good-looking in the movies when the country is so openly hostile to sartorial maintenance.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#5. Time renders all peope and all things silent. But I will speak of you, of all of you, for all the time I have.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#6. Time has a way of returning all heedlessness to those who commit it ... even if they are Divine.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#7. I don't have the time or the energy to hate," says Shara. "I only wish to understand. People are what they are.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#8. 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.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#9. The gods are cruel not because they make us work. They are cruel because they allow us to hope.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#10. Do you not enslave people now?" asks the man. "Chains are forged of many strange metals. Poverty is one. Fear, another. Ritual and custom are yet more. All actions are forms of slavery, methods of forcing people to do what they deeply wish not to do.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#13. The world may not go on forever. But that does not mean we cannot try to make tomorrow better.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#14. We are - or were - Divinities, Shara Komayd: we drew power from the hearts and minds and beliefs of a people. But that which you draw power from, you are also powerless before ... A people believe in a god ... and the god tells them what to believe.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#16. We think we move, we run, we push forward, but, I think, in many ways we are still running in place, trapped in a moment that happened to us long ago.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#17. 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.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#19. Up by the fortress was this ... thinadeskite you mentioned?" Mulaghesh grimaces. So much for state secrets. "Yes.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#20. The soul might be within the eyes, but the subconscious, the matter of their behavior; that is in the hands. Watch a man's hands, and you watch his heart.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#21. THERE ARE THOSE WHO COME UPON A CHOICE, A CHANCE, AND TREMBLE AND FEAR - WHY SHOULD I ALLOW THEM IN MY SHADOW?
Robert Jackson Bennett
#22. And we convict almost every case, she thinks, because the law requires us to prosecute them for living their way of life.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#23. It is not hard to believe that this is the land that birthed the nuclear age: anything feels possible out here.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#24. Why is it," says Vohannes as he walks her to the door, "that whenever we finish our business, it feels like neither of us got what we wanted?" "Perhaps we conduct the wrong sort of business.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#25. It's a symbiotic relationship: those two excel at being idiots, and I excel at shooting idiots. Everyone gets what they want.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#26. Here at the edges, in the cracks and at the crossroads, stepping from shadow to shadow in the river of darkness that runs through the heart of Wink, he feels much more at home.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#27. Time renders all people and all things silent. And gods, it seems, are no exception.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#28. The gush of blood is positively tidal. Shara feels a little disgusted at herself for thinking only, This will definitely make the papers.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#29. She devoted her life to this place, this work. If that doesn't make a home, Turyin Mulaghesh, then nothing does.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#30. What I'm going to do up here, kid, is tell you a story. Like all stories, it's an attempt to make sense of something larger than itself. And, like most stories, it fails, to a certain degree. It's a gloss, a rendition, so it's not exact. But it'll do.
-Silenus
Robert Jackson Bennett
#31. There's no such thing as a good death ... It's just a dull, stupid thing we all have to do eventually. To ask meaning of it is to ask meaning of a shadow.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#32. There is nothing worse than an opponent who is suddenly revealed to be understanding and compassionate.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#33. I love its potential. I hate its past. And I don't like what it is.' She hugs her knees close to her chest. 'The way you feel about the place you grew up in is a lot like how you feel about your family.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#35. So many systems, so many pieces ... more complicated than the most complicated of clocks. I wonder, sometimes: are we truly one thing, one being, or many, many different things, simply dreaming they are one?
Robert Jackson Bennett
#37. 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.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#38. Torture usually gets you whatever you want to hear. And people are usually much more forgiving of this method. Mostly because they're never quite sure any of it really happened.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#39. 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.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#40. History, as you may know, is much like a spiral staircase that gives the illusion of going up, but never quite goes anywhere.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#41. Vohannes turns and grins at her. "So! Here is the triumphant warrior, fresh off of her conquest. What an epic night you've had!" "Vo, I honestly do not have time for your supposed charms. How did you get in?" "By liberally applying my supposed charms, of course," says Vohannes.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#43. Density, matter, radiation ... it's all just construction paper and pipe cleaners and glue, with the proper perspective.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#44. Nations have no morals," says Shara, quoting her aunt from memory. "Only interests.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#46. Killing echoes inside you. It never goes away. Maybe some who have killed don't know that they've lost something, but they have.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#47. And then it was like there was a split in the world and George could see out of it, and glimpse the endless machinery that kept the world running. And then, for one moment, he could see even more ...
Robert Jackson Bennett
#48. There is no better time to examine and understand one's selfhood than when it is dissected and hurtling through darkness.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#50. The woman smiles. The smile is neither pleasant nor unpleasant: it is a smile like fine silver plate, used for one occasion and polished and put away once finished.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#51. What a foreign concept it is to die, to cough up what you are as if it is no more than mucus pooled at the back of your throat, and perish.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#52. Is it ignorance if you don't care to know it?" "Yes. That is almost the definition of ignorance, actually.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#53. If one were to protest all the injustices of life," says Sigrud, "great and small, one would have no time for living.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#55. I have never met a person who possessed a privilege who did not exercise that privilege to the fullest extent that they possibly could.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#56. And was it her imagination, but did the lump in her back move just a little as the boys' team emerged from the shadow of a willow and broke into sunlight?
Robert Jackson Bennett
#57. Everything, all of it ... it has been a huge mistake. This is what they need of you, isn't it? This is what idealists and visionaries ask of you - to make their mistakes for them.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#58. Is it sleep you want to find?" he asks quietly. "Or dreams you wish to escape?" She
Robert Jackson Bennett
#59. Lonely places draw lonely people ... They echo inside us, and we cannot help but listen.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#60. You've always believed war to be a grand performance. But to me it's just killing, just the ugliest thing a person can ever do ... So when you need to do it, there's no need to make a show of it.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#61. But this is wishful thinking: as the Polis Governor of Bulikov, the capital city of the Continent, it is her duty to preside over all trials,
Robert Jackson Bennett
#62. The Divine may have created many hells", he says, "but I think they pale beside what men create for themselves.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#63. We are beautiful, strange creatures of heat and noise, of sudden, inscrutable impulses, of savage passions.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#65. When the world grinds you down, you pick a handful of fires to hold close to your heart.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#66. When the auto arrives it's hard to believe there's a functional vehicle underneath all the mud and moss and sprays of gravel, which stick to the sides like barnacles on a ship.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#68. I was taught that peace is the absence of war. But I wonder if these days we've simply replaced conventional war with a war of paper. I'm not sure which is better.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#69. It is a fool who lives his life believing the waves upon which he sails shall remember him. The seas know nothing. This makes them beautiful. And this makes them terrible. - DREYLING PROVERB, ORIGIN
Robert Jackson Bennett
#71. We all reconstruct our past because we wish to see how our present came to be our present - do we not?
Robert Jackson Bennett
#72. I wished to be an artist," Ivanya confides to Shara. "But it simply didn't turn out that way. I didn't have the ... I'm not sure. The imagination, I suppose, or the ambition, or both. You have to be a bit outside things to make something new, but I was always very much inside things.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#73. Just because you won the War doesn't mean you can do whatever you like!' says Yaroslav. 'And just because we lost it doesn't mean you can strip us of everything we value!
Robert Jackson Bennett
#74. Oh, propriety," says Mrs Benjamin. "We're always so concerned with propriety. Even in total madness, we still stick to our hierarchies and chains of command.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#75. When I come back to you, if I come back to you, will I know you? Will you be the city of my memory? Or will you be a stranger?
Robert Jackson Bennett
#76. He remembers looking up in his jail cell and seeing a needle of sunlight poking through, and trying to cradle that tiny pinhole of light in his hands.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#78. Old texts say many things. You say these things as though they are special
as if it is unusual for one person to see another in pain, and wish to help. As if, he says quietly, to do the extraordinary
or what you think is extraordinary
a person must be told to do so, by the Divine.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#79. Pitry regrets not defining the phrase "other side of the hill" more precisely. As he marches along the wandering paths, it increasingly feels like this hill keeps producing other sides out of nowhere for him, none of which bear any sign of civilization. At
Robert Jackson Bennett
#80. 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.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#81. Deserve.' How preoccupied we are with that. With what we should have, with what we are owed. I wonder if any word has ever caused more heartache.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#82. The more you are at sea,' Sigrud explains, 'the more you learn. And the more you learn, the more help and assistance is a troublesome bother. Dealing death, after all, is a solitary affair.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#84. No matter what happens, to either of us," says Sigrud, "you have always been a very good friend to m, Shara Komayd. I have known very few good people. But I think that you are one of them.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#86. Just because the nightmare you expected comes true, it doesn't make it any less terrifying.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#87. In retrospect they might have started sleeping together solely out of conversational exhaustion.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#88. For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was ever a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was, and there was only ever the butterfly.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#91. Is this how governments are made? Forcing decisions on wounded people in the middle of the night?
Robert Jackson Bennett
#92. I never saw a country before," says the robed man. "All I saw was the earth under my feet.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#93. Every second is a forever in Wink. Every day is a cool afternoon waiting to happen. And every life is one lived quietly, with your feet up and your sun-dappled lawn before you as you watch the world happily drift by.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#95. One has no room for vengeance,' says Shara, 'when the eyes of the world are watching. We must be judicious, and bloodless.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#96. O, the things we kill for our dreams, forgetting all the while we shall wake up to find them naught but dust and ash!
What fools we are to pretend that when we walk to war, we do not bring our loved ones with us.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#99. Mrs. Benjamin does not precisely understand first aid, but she thinks she gets the general principles: things that are within the body must stay within at all times. If they do not stay in, they must be forced in, and kept there via things like gauze and sticky tape.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#100. Thus it was quickly decided that Pitry - being young, cheerful, and not in the room at the time - would be the best man for the job.
Robert Jackson Bennett
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