Gavin's Reviews > The Thousandfold Thought

Flashes of brilliance but he mostly continues to squander the amazing setup from book 1.

Like any good manipulator, Kellhus often says true things:

' "Why do so many give, when it is so easy to take?" But you ask these questions because you know nothing of strength. For what is strength but the resolve to deny base inclinations—the determination to sacrifice in the name of one's brothers? You, Ikurei Conphas, know only weakness, and because it takes strength to acknowledge weakness, you call your weakness strength.'

The world is about to end. The world is about to end. Said enough times, any phrase — even this one — was sure to be leached of its meaning... Two thousand years of preparation, it seemed, had left them utterly unprepared...

Esmenet felt it then, overpowering her, and in the strange fashion of moving souls, she struggled to ward it away. But it was too late. For what seemed the first time, she understood: his pointless urgency, his desperation to be believed, his haggard love, his short-winded compassion—shadows of the Apocalypse, all. To witness the dissolution of nations, to be stripped night after night of everything cherished, everything fair. The miracle was that he still loved, that he still recognized mercy, pity

when the gears do not meet, they become as teeth. So it is with men and their machinations... Only when things were broken did their meaning become clear.

"For your entire life you yearned for a bold God, not one who skulked in scriptoriums, whispering the inaudible to the insane."

"The players of viramsata have made games of truth. They tell lies about who said what to whom, about who makes love to whomever, and so on. They do this continually, and what is more, they are at pains to act out the lies told by others, especially when they are elegant, so they might make them true. And so it goes from tongue to lip to tongue, until no distinction remains between what is a lie and what is true. "In the end, at a great ceremony, it is the most compelling tale that is declared Pirvirsut, a word that means 'this breath is ground' in ancient Vaparsi. The weak, the inelegant, have died, while others grow strong, yielding only to the Pirvirsut, the Breath-that-is-Ground. "Do you see? The viramsata, they become living things, and we are their battle plain."

the feeling of certainty is no more a marker of truth than the feeling of will is a marker of freedom

Kellhus had given these men more than gestures or promises, more even than insight or direction. He had given them dominion. Over their doubts. Over their most hated foes. He had made them strong. But how could lies do such a thing? ...what looked like hope or truth or love from within could be a scythe or a hammer, things wielded for other ends, when seen from without.

...He was no longer of the People. He was more. There was no thought he could not think. No act he could not undertake. No lips he could not kiss ... Nothing was forbidden... there were truces, the coming together of coincidental interests, but nothing else, nothing meaningful. Kellhus had taught him that. He cackled aloud when the revelation struck, and for a moment the world itself wobbled. A sense of power suffused him, so intense it seemed something other might snap from his frame, that throwing out his arms he could shear Joktha's walls from their foundations, cast them to the horizon. No reason bound him. Nothing. No scruple, no instinct, no habit, no calculation, no hate ... He stood beyond origin or outcome. He stood nowhere. "The men wonder," Troyatti said cautiously, "what amuses you, Lord." Cnaiür grinned. "That I once cared for my life."

[With horror:] They make us love! They make us love!