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" If there is murder in the heart, Stiofain, and blood on the hands, we must cleanse it with prayer and music and poems. If we do not . . .” He searched the boy’s eyes. “Stiofain, if I can wish for one thing, it’s that you hear me now. Don’t be flinging the wheat of your youth into the fire. Work it hard, grind your anger into flour, and some day, I promise you, we’ll be sitting down to feasts instead of funerals.” “Oh, Father,” the boy cried, “you are a fine spinner of words. But I am drowning in blood! "
― Michael D. O'Brien , Strangers and Sojourners (Children of the Last Days #1)
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" Culture is the last refuge, the sanctuary, the human place in the midst of the surrounding dehumanization. Through the arts man is able to know himself, even if only on the intuitive level. He senses his own worth, even when he cannot articulate it.” “Can a poem or a song defeat a tyrant?” Defeat a killer, defeat atrocities, defeat the bottom falling out of the universe when you least expect it? “Yes. Yes, it can, given enough time. When a work of art is both beautiful and true, man’s freedom is strengthened by it—both his interior need for freedom and his capacity to seek a rational understanding of it.” “You hope for a lot.” “Yes, I hope for it. And if I didn’t, I would die of despair.” “You are a person of extremes”, Josip says, not unkindly. “Am I? I suppose so. But which is more extreme, a man who desires to speak the truth in a season of lies or a tyrant who creates the lies that engulf an entire people?” Josip nods in agreement. "
― Michael D. O'Brien , The Island of the World