Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from the truths of others.
The dark protects us from what we dare not know.
Its second gift its comforting illusion: the ease gentle dreams in night’s embrace, the beauty that imagination brings to what would repel in the day’s harsh light. But the greatest of its comfort is the illusion that dark is temporary: that every evening brings a new day. Because it’s the day that is temporary.
Day is the illusion.
Its third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nights that divide them, as the stars are difined by the infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth from the center of its own self.
With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.
The dark is generous, and its patient. It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt. The dark can be patient, because the slightest drop of rain will cause those seeds to sprout.
The rain will come, and the seeds will sprout, for the dark is the soil in which they grow, and its the clouds above them, and its wait behind the stars that gives them light.
The dark’s patient is infinite.
Eventually, even stars burn out.
The dark is generous, and its patient, and it always wins. It always wins because it is everywhere. It is in the wood that burns in your heart, and in the keetle of the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun, and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.
The brightest light casts the darked shadow.
The dark is generous, and its patient and it always win - but in the heart of its strenght lies its weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.
Love is more than a candle.
Love can ignite the stars.”
Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith novelization, by Matthew Stover
I’ll never shut up about the ROTS novel but one of my absolute favorite parts is the brief realization Anakin/Vader has when he wakes up in Vader’s suit:
“You remember all of it.
You remember the dragon that you brought Vader forth from your heart to slay. You remember the cold venom in Vader’s blood. You remember the furnace of Vader’s fury, and the black hatred of seizing her throat to silence her lying mouth–
And there is one blazing moment in which you finally understand that there was no dragon. That there was no Vader. That there was only you. Only Anakin Skywalker.
Anakin Skywalker by Revenge of the Sith is the result of:
1. A childhood in slavery
2. The Jedi Order’s philosophy and treatment of him
3. Obi-Wan Kenobi’s attempts of doing his level best
4. A war
5. SHEEV PALPATINE’S GROOMING AND MANIPULATION, something which has lasted for at least eight years prior to the start of the Clone Wars.