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ruin

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You can't stop a soldier from being frightened but you can give him motivation to help him overcome that fear. I have no such motivation. I can't have. I'm a witcher: an artificially created mutant. I kill monsters for money. I defend children when their parents pay me to. If Nilfgaardian parents pay me, I'll defend Nilfgaardian children. And even if the world lies in ruin - which does not seem likely to me - I'll carry on killing monsters in the ruins of this world until some monster kills me. That is my fate, my reason, my life and my attitude to the world. And it is not what I chose. It was chosen for me.

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When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change,' wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. And so it was with my father. His mind did not melt evenly into undistinguishable lumps, like a dissolving sand castle. It was ravaged selectively, like Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in northern Wales suppressed in 1531 by King Henry VIII in his split with the Church of Rome. Tintern was turned over to a nobleman, its stained-glass windows smashed, its roof tiles taken up and relaid in village houses. Holy artifacts were sold to passing tourists. Religious statues turned up in nearby gardens. At least one interior wall was dismantled to build a pigsty.I've seen photographs of the remains that inspired Wordsworth: a Gothic skeleton, soaring and roofless, in a green hilly landscape. Grass grows in the transept. The vanished roof lets in light. The delicate stone tracery of its slim, arched quatrefoil windows opens onto green pastures where black-and-white cows graze. Its shape is beautiful, formal, and mysterious. After he developed dementia, my father was no longer useful to anybody. But in the shelter of his broken walls, my mother learned to balance her checkbook, and my heart melted and opened. Never would I wish upon my father the misery of his final years. But he was sacred in his ruin, and I took from it the shards that still sustain me.

KB
Katy Butler

Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death

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For all these stars,nothing is new.They__e seen all kinds of warsand miracles, too.They know the messengers with their holy bookswill smile and wash their hands in blood.They know the politicians with their good lookswill make the poor eat pies of mud.They__e seen the Earth freeze and then burn with greed.They__e seen the treesand the seas emptied.Yet, you won__ hear their sneerswhen a man arrivesand, having experienced a number of years,proclaims: 'I have lived!'Because nothing is new under these stars:the lies, the love, the memories and scars, the ruin, the revolution, the fakes and true,the families, the friends, none of it is new.All of it__ven the me and you.

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I know who you are,_ he says.Something about his tone causes my heart of smoke to flicker in response, and I throw my guard up. __h? And who, O boy of Parthenia, am I?__e nods to himself, his eyes alight. __ou__e her. You__e that jinni. Oh, gods. Oh, great bleeding gods! You__e the one who started the war!___xcuse me?___ou__e the jinni who betrayed that famous queen__hat was her name? Roshana? She was trying to bring peace between the jinn and the humans, but you turned on her and started the Five Hundred Wars.__ turn cold. I want him to stop, but he doesn__.____e heard the stories,_ he says. ____e heard the songs. They call you the Fair Betrayer, who enchanted humans with your . . ._ He pauses to swallow. __our beauty. You promised them everything, and then you ruined them.