In a better world, he thought, I'd have followed that man to hell.
Being doomed doesn't take away from the dignity of the effort, though.
In the thousand years since its foundation, the city had never been taken by force, though twice it had been seduced.
I am scared, when I first go to cities. I think I am never fit in, never belong. All this worry I make. And is nothing. To lose everything is not the worst can happen.'
There is great nobility in ordinary people. The world disappoints us all, and the ways we change our own stories to survive that disappointment are beautiful and tragic and hilarious. On balance, I fi...
The problem with loving someone you don't trust is finding the right distance.
I've never told Liat. About who I am. Do you think ... Maati, can you love someone and not trust them?We're born to odd lives, Otah-kvo, Maati said, sounding suddenly older and more sorrowful. If we w...
I've never see God, Yardem said.But you believe in him, Master Kit said.I'm reserving judgement.
A monstrous talent that could do anything because no one had managed to convince it of what was impossible.
What had been a shared moment was private now, and always would be. Even if he were to tell the story, it would be a tale told and not the thing itself. The difference between those two was the divisi...
I think the world is often like that. Like what? Comic, but only at the right distance.
And what’s the difference between us, that you’ll brush his sins aside and not my own?Maati smiled. You aren’t him, he said.And you love him.Maati took a pose of affirmation.And love is more important...
When you start talking about killed friends and lost babies, justice and revenge are two names for the same dog.
The story of a person could never be as complex as they actually were because then it would take as much time to know someone as it did to be them. Reputation, even when deserved, inevitably meant sim...
The nature of history itself defies us. To know with certainty what the last Dragon Emperor thought or planned or schemed would require not only an understanding of the draconic mind lost to humanity...
People love their fathers. Their sisters. People love dogs or songs or poems. If I've got to be the champion of something, make it something that doesn't change what it means every time someone says i...
Can you love someone you don't trust?Absolutely, he said. I have a sister I wouldn't lend two copper lengths if I wanted them back. The problem with loving someone you don't trust is finding the right...
We drink to the gods, Amiit said, raising his bowl. May they never drink to us.
There is a man named Ovi Niit. He runs a comfort house in the soft quarter. I mean to take it from him.
That's the whole world. You. Me. The sea, the sky. Every retching thing there is. It's all a dream the dragons dream, and if the last dragon ever wakes up, we're fu*ked. (pg. 12)