"But once you allow yourself to recognize necessity, you find two things: One you find your options so restricted that the only course of action is obvious, and, two, that a great sense of freedom comes with the decision"
About this Quote
Necessity is usually framed as the enemy of freedom; Brust flips it into a cheat code for decision-making. The line works because it smuggles a paradox into plain language: constraint doesn’t merely narrow your life, it clarifies it. “Allow yourself to recognize” is the tell. The barrier isn’t the world’s limits, but our reluctance to name them. We stall in the comforting fiction of infinite options, treating deliberation as virtue when it’s often just avoidance dressed up as nuance.
The first discovery is almost mechanical: once you accept what must be done, the menu collapses. Brust’s phrasing makes that collapse sound like a relief, not a loss. “The only course of action is obvious” isn’t a celebration of determinism so much as an indictment of dithering. The obvious was there all along; the mind just kept it obscured with hypotheticals.
Then comes the emotional punch: “a great sense of freedom comes with the decision.” Not with the outcome, or the victory, but with the act of choosing inside a boxed-in reality. The subtext is existentialist in a working-writer’s register: agency isn’t having endless doors, it’s walking through one without pretending you could live every other life too.
In the context of Brust’s fantasy storytelling, necessity often arrives as duty, survival, or moral debt - forces that feel oppressive until a character stops negotiating with them. That’s the intent here: to show how acceptance can be bracing, even liberating, because it replaces anxiety with commitment.
The first discovery is almost mechanical: once you accept what must be done, the menu collapses. Brust’s phrasing makes that collapse sound like a relief, not a loss. “The only course of action is obvious” isn’t a celebration of determinism so much as an indictment of dithering. The obvious was there all along; the mind just kept it obscured with hypotheticals.
Then comes the emotional punch: “a great sense of freedom comes with the decision.” Not with the outcome, or the victory, but with the act of choosing inside a boxed-in reality. The subtext is existentialist in a working-writer’s register: agency isn’t having endless doors, it’s walking through one without pretending you could live every other life too.
In the context of Brust’s fantasy storytelling, necessity often arrives as duty, survival, or moral debt - forces that feel oppressive until a character stops negotiating with them. That’s the intent here: to show how acceptance can be bracing, even liberating, because it replaces anxiety with commitment.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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