Yellow highlight | Location: 564
My awesome quote!

Yellow highlight | Location: 566
Another cool quote...

Using Sublime Text , you can use easily clean this up by:

1. Select Find > Replace from the menu bar
2. Ensure regular expressions is selected
3. Past the following regex into the find field (note the trailing period):

^.*Yellow highlight.*\n

4. Replace all with an empty space!

This leaves you with a relatively clean copy of your highlights.

My Highlights

For all its faults—and they are numberless—I felt a sudden affection for the Empire of my home,

Rome of old was not loved for its greatness, so the poet wrote. Rome was great because men loved her, as I loved my Empire in that moment.

A fear born of the fact that though we may come back to a place at the end of our journeys, we never really return, for we are not the same person who departed.

Alexander needed desperately to become something. To become someone. To matter. Thus it is for all men. We are nothing until we have accomplished something.

that the privilege of one’s birth is no privilege at all, only another kind of cage.

“Well then,” she said, “’tis well that whether we fail or not is up to us.”

But it was better this way. To appear ostentatious was to exaggerate my importance. Understating my arrival like this sent a different message: that I did not need to exaggerate.

“Because I have earned their respect. Rank only formalizes relationships between people, Alexander. It does not create them. One has rank because one deserves it, and if one does not deserve it, he will lose his rank. Or his life. A man would do well to become worthy of his honors, else he will be deposed as a tyrant.”

“From little towns in a far land we came, to save our honour and a world aflame,”

That is why the best commanders, the best captains and kings, make themselves known to their people—that their people may be known to them. That we might not betray their trust and obedience when the critical time came.

Sir Gawain. Turning my head, I stopped and looked to the statue nearest me on the other side. SIR LANCELOT. I guessed then I could name the others. Percival, Bedivere, Gareth, and Kay. Gaheris and Galahad. Tristan and Palamedes. The Knights of the Round Table.

I had believed that I alone had the wisdom to set the world to rights, not knowing then that true wisdom lies in knowing that I did not possess that wisdom, and never would.

Men are slower to act from principle than self-interest, and far slower to act on principle than jealousy or revenge.

I had to choose. The only way out was through. Always forward, I thought to myself.

Reader, have I already said that there is a difference between knowing a fact and owning it?

“Because we are not good.” It took me a moment to realize that it had been I who’d answered. Both my master and student looked at me. “If we were good men, we’d not need all this reflection.”

The stone giants, the city, the mountain on which I stood existed in another present. One that had not happened—that could not happen—because the past that informed its reality had not. I had come to a time unreal and unrealized.

As darkness brings forth the creatures of the night, so silence brings forth the things within our hearts… if we will but listen to it.

“Hadrian,” she said, “you were gone for forty days.”

The allusion here is interesting.

Consciousness, I think, is a mechanism we humans have evolved for sorting the threads of time. We do it blindly, and that is enough for most of us, most of the time. I am no different, save that I have learned to listen. To see.

Nothing is without meaning, because nothing is without consequence.

“We are all chosen for something,”

I am not certain if a hell awaits the unjust hereafter, but I know there are hells in this life.

We had expanded too far, brushed against the borders of infinity. Infinity had pushed back.

“We are going to lose people now.” It had struck me as a funny thing to say at the time. We had already lost people fighting in the streets, had lost an entire fleet and orbital defense platform. We had been losing people for days. He’d meant civilians, but the word choice stuck with me. What were soldiers then, if not people?

Pallino had told me long ago that proper Sollan officers don’t duck. In the open, a shot will find you crouching as easily as standing, he’d said. Plus the men don’t like it. That had always stuck with me. The men don’t like it.

He was braver than I ever was. Braver… or more foolish. Or perhaps they are the same thing.

Darkness greeted us, darkness and the sense that we were running out of time.

Highlights

Fear is death to reason.
“And reason death to fear.”

“[…] Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. […]”

We believe our fear destroyed by new bravery. It is not. Fear is never destroyed. It is only made smaller by the courage we find after. It is always there.

I find this to be true even in my own life. My fears never truly go away; I just get better at managing them.

We are not always the authors of our own stories.

We have little control over our ends, and none over what passes beyond them. But if we live well and truly, those who follow on may remember us for our lives and not our deaths.

A man is the sum of his memories—and more—he is the sum of all those others he has met, and what he learned from them. And that is an encouraging thought, for that knowledge and those memories survive and are part of us through every storm, and every little death.

Each of us contains multitudes, but it is not that we are cells in the body of humankind. Rather we are clay, shaped as the mountain is shaped: by the wind, the tramping foot, and the rain. By the world. The mark of other hands is on us, but we are ourselves alone.

There are two sorts of men. One hears an order from his better and obeys. The other sees order in himself and obeys that. All men obey something, even if it is only themselves.

These feel very Stoic to me for some reason.

Lucifer and Prometheus are the same.

This is an interesting comparison to make. In the Bible, Lucifer (Satan) is a fallen angel who “gives” mankind knowledge of good an evil. In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a Titan who steals fire from the gods and gives it mankind in the form of knowledge.

Evil is older than we, other than we—or is greater than, extending back and forward across all of conscious Time. Reader, there are other devils than Man. And by our evolved reason we may be sure of understanding human devils only.

We live in a world where only man has evolved to sentience. Trying to imagine worse evils than those we have perpetrated is a dark and interesting thought experiment.

And know this: every thought had by every philosopher and scholiast, every scientist and priest, is framed by the human mind.

Sometimes two groups can be shaped in ways that make communication fundamentally difficult, if not impossible.

Thus often do we return to those childish things when the weight of responsibility and of trial becomes too much to bear alone.

Escapism as a coping mechanism can be a powerful tool.

Obedience out of fear of pain.
Obedience out of fear of the other.
Obedience out of love for the person of the hierarch.
Obedience out of loyalty to the office of the hierarch.
Obedience out of respect for the laws of men and of heaven.
Obedience out of piety.
Obedience out of compassion.
Obedience out of devotion.

Obedience is a theme that keeps coming up in these books.

Have I said that what we perceive as darkness is only the chaos that came—without light’s order—before Creation itself? That is why we imagine anything might be lurking in the darkness.

Highlights

The fool believes the iniquities of the world are the fault of other men. […] The truly wise try to change themselves, which is the more difficult and less grand task.

The man who hopes for the future delays its arrival, and the man who dreads it summons it to his door.

Olorin took a step back before answering. “I will tell him I met a man, a lord of the strange Empire. I will tell him of your quality.” His smile capered on his face. “And your quality will be known in Jadd and on the battlefields of our war before ever you find yourself there. You will have friends.”

This reminds me of the scene between Balian and Imad ad-Din from Kingdom of Heaven (one of my favorite movies).