The worst atrocities began with half-measures, with apologies, compromising with the wrong side, shrinking from what had to be done. - C. J. Cherryh

But how could anybody of her generation pull all those hours of recorded history up, and listen to all of it, and understand it? You’d have to live all the hours of all those negotiations, and all the simultaneous other hours of every other record, and you still wouldn’t get the gestalt of having grown up in it. You knew more, viewing it from the perspective of another generation, because the hidden things came out, but you knew less, too, because the context that made it all make sense had gone away.

Things whispered here, and the trees muttered with the wind and perhaps with other things. Men knew the place was old, old as the world, and they never made peace with it.

When it is necessary to survive, then one cannot be brave anymore.