Darrow O'Lykos Quotes

"War is our time. Sevro thought he could escape it. I thought I could end it. But our enemy is like the Hydra. Cut off one head, two more sprout. They will not sue for peace. They will not surrender. Their heart must be excised, their will to fight ground to the finest dust. Only then will there be peace."

"I once thought the greatest sin of war was violence. It isn’t. The greatest sin is it requires good men to become practical."

"hope is an opiate, not a plan."

"An omega-atomic will impact in thirty seconds,” I say quietly. The Red outside my cockpit is listening too, his face pressed to the glass just two hand spans away from my own. “Your fight is behind you. Remember now your beloved. Your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your daughter, your son.” I meet his eyes. They look so much like my mother’s. “Remember the sea, the highland forests, Agea at dawn, Olympia at twilight, Attica in spring, Thessalonica in harvest.” As I speak, they close their eyes and unscrew the canisters of Martian soil to clench in their hands. Gold and Red, Blue and Orange, Gray and Obsidian. My heart breaks in half. “Remember home. Remember Mars. You go there now to rest under the shade of her—"

"You were not misunderstood by your father, Atalantia. You were simply disliked. Aja was his pride. Moira was his joy. You were just…there with your silk, and your Venusian orgies. Acting out to get attention. And now you’re his last resort. The pitiable last sentence of a family saga that is almost over."

"Daxo taught my son to build castles in the sand. Pax cried when the waves came in. Your brother sat him on his knee and told him that’s all life is. Moments you build only to see washed away. But that doesn’t mean it’s all for nothing. The key is having a long memory for the sweet, and a short one for the bitter. I will miss your brother, Thraxa. But he isn’t gone."

"I look into their faces. Not a man or woman amongst them expects to survive the hour. But as the waiting has ended, so too has the fear. Not one quibbles or shies from duty. I could not be prouder."

"in the kingdom of death, amidst ramparts of bodies and wind all of screams, there is a king, and his name is not Lune. It is Reaper."

"I had this picture in my head where I would wake beside Virginia. I’d let her sleep and rise to make coffee, breakfast. And when they woke, my wife and son would find me reading at the kitchen table, or maybe making something out back."

"I kept looking for hope in the world. Expecting the world to supply deliverance if I plucked the right chords. Demanding that it supply validation to my labor if I just gave enough effort. But that is not the nature of the world. Its nature is to consume. In time, it will consume us all, and the spheres will spin until they too are consumed when our sun dies. Maybe that is the point of it. Knowing that though one day darkness will cover all, at least your eyes were open to see moments of light."

"Not for the first time, I try to seek refuge in anger. I want a fight. I need a fight. It’s how I’m made—to struggle in eternal vain."

"The anger that once made planets tremble is now toothless. Shorn of my myth by my failure, shorn of my army by my mistakes, shorn of my friends and family by the demands I made on them, I know hate will not return what I have lost or repair what I have broken. The sun has raged for 4.6 billion years. I have raged for sixteen. No surprise, the sun has more fuel to spare."

"My heart is buried with my army in those sands. But my body trudges on, as it does, no matter the ruin it leaves in its wake."

"The path is made of many stones that look all the same. When you trod upon evil, do not rest or look down because goodness is only a step away. The next may bring ruin, the next joy, but these stones are not your destination, they are but your journey to the path’s end."

"I’ve always felt Pinks to be the most oppressed of the Colors, their plight imbuing some of them with preternatural internal strength."

"If you don’t use a machine, it breaks down. Like the Sons of Ares when we phased them in to the Republic military, like this base. But if something is used too much, it breaks apart, like Orion on Mercury. Like Sevro after Venus. Leadership is a tightrope, especially when you’re losing."

"Inside me there is a coward who fears discomfort. That coward will offer solace in the form of excuses. But it is the coward who grooms a man for his defeats. The coward who makes him accept them because he is accustomed to finding a good reason to quit. The coward inside can only be killed one way."

"The first understanding: The path to the Vale is inscrutable, eternal, and perfect. It cannot be seen with the eyes, nor felt underfoot. It winds as it wills. It ends where it must. It climbs when it does. It falls when it should.” I flow into the autumn strikes, bending back and lashing forward in attack. “It stretches deep into the rocks we dig, and back into our hearts. It winds on before and after us, in all directions and none. Though we may walk it, we may never master it. Though we may see the path, we can never know the truth. The path to the Vale is inscrutable, eternal, and perfect. It must be followed at all cost.” Six more understandings follow the first as I pass through the seasons of the Willow Way to fluctuations in gravity. Over the course of the hour, the narration loops a dozen times, playing on when I lay heaving on my back. “The fourth understanding: The supreme good is the wind of the deepmines. It flows through rock, around people, and over all lands. The wind is oblivious to obstacles though they shape her path. When you smell rust on her breeze, or hear the echo of tools in the dark, smile and be glad. The path is upon you, and you are upon it. All you must do is walk."

"To those who wrote that we might read, to those who fell so we might walk, to those who came before so we might come after, gratitude."

"Aurae is a rare Pink. Not a cheap thrill with angel wings or horns or a silky tail waiting for a client in a Pearl club. Nor a Helen of Troy either—the type of flashing thoroughbred as might be seen on the arm of Atalantia or Apollonius. Aurae is a Raa hetaera. A beauty of shadow and dust with autumnal tragedy written in her features. Her face is long. Her skin is a shade darker than olive. Her thick hair is wavy and blue-black and never seems to be the same color or in the same braid twice. It is impossible to guess her age. Some have guessed forty, some thirty, some twenty. It’s her eyes that make that last one impossible. They are wide set, dark pink, and ancient."

"You know me. I never fight fair if I can help it."

"Even if I loathe war, my body thrills to its rituals like a drunk hearing the clink of ice into a whiskey tumbler."

"I love Sevro to death, and he is fundamentally a good friend, but he feels no need to be a good person when dealing with enemies."

"We achieve perfection first by acknowledging our failures. We increase understanding first by recognizing our ignorance."