You died to teach me that I was wrong—that though we had saved her we had killed her too, that that feeling we had had, striding through them as if through worthless dogs, was a poison that would never stop spreading in men who had guns. Until all the people like Butterfly, who lived in peace without guns, were dead, murdered by us. And then only men with guns would be left, and they would murder each other too, as fast as they could in the hope that it wouldn’t happen to them, until the human world died, and we all fell into this preta realm and then to hell.
Clipping
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
“Now, I have watched the Hodenosaunee as closely as a child watches its mother. I see how sons are brought up through their motherline, and cannnot inherit anything from their fathers, so that there can be no accumulation of power in any one man. There can be no emperors here. I have seen how the women choose the marriages and advise all aspects of life, how the elderly and orphans are cared for. How the nations are divided into the tribes, woven so that you are all brothers and sisters through the league, warp and weft. How the sachems are chosen by the people, including the women. How if a sachem were to do something bad they would be cast out. How their sons are nothing special, but men like any other men, soon to marry out and have sons of their own who will leave, and daughters who will stay, until all have their say. I have seen how this system of affairs brings peace to your league. It is, in all this world, the best system of rule ever invented by human beings.”
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
“All the nations on this island are your will-be brothers, your will-be sisters. This is how you should greet them. Hello, will-be brother! How fare you? They will recognize your soul as theirs. They will join you if you are their elder brother, showing them the way forward.
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
An alchemist, precisely, but in an eastern tradition stranger than any Sufi’s, as if he were not only reverting to Buddhism but going beyond it, back to Tibet’s older religion, Bön as Iwang called it.
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
As he watched her work in the afternoons, Bahram thought: love changed everything. They were all just animals after all, creatures God had made not much different from monkeys, and there was no real reason why a woman’s breasts should not be like the udders on a cow, swinging together inelegantly as she leaned forward to work at one labor or another; but love made them orbs of the utmost beauty, and the same was true of the whole world. Love put all things under a description, and only love could save them.
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
There is a secret core in everyone that not even Gabriel can know by trying to know. Listen now. The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal. Khalid wanted to know reality with his intellect, and he can’t. Now he knows that, and is downcast. Intellect has no real mettle, you see, and at the first threat, into a hole it scuttles. But love is divine. It comes from the realm of the infinite, and is entrusted to the heart as a gift from God. Love has no calculation in it. ‘God loves you’ is the only possible sentence!
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
Mowlana’s beautiful poem of reincarnation: I died as mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose as animal, I died as animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar With angels blessed; but even from angelhood I must pass on: “All save the face of God doth perish.” When I have sacrificed my angelic soul, I shall become what no mind has ever conceived, Oh, let me not exist! for non-existence Proclaims in organ tones: “To Him shall we return.”
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
Strange to think that each true life was only a few years long—that one passed through several in each bodily span. He said, “God is great. We will never meet again.”
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
Try helping other spirits first, as if you were a bodhisattva already.
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books > The Ministry for the Future (Robinson, Kim Stanley)
Maybe that was what PTSD was— the inability to do the work of forgetting, or of not recalling.