This is our role: To weave together those disparate energies. To manipulate and mitigate and, through the prism of our awareness, produce a singular force that cannot be denied. To make of cacophony, symphony.
We realized it was impossible to protect any one place if the place next door was drowning or on fire. We realized the old boundaries weren’t meant to keep the undesirable out, but to hoard resources within. And the hoarders were the core of the problem.
Love is no inoculation against murder.
It was said that the gods favored fools because they were entertaining to watch.
Alabaster was never mad; he’s just learned so much that would have driven a lesser soul to gibbering, that sometimes it shows. Letting out some of that accumulated horror by occasionally sounding like a frothing maniac is how he copes. It’s also how he warns you, you know now, that he’s about to destroy some additional measure of your naivete. Nothing is ever as simple as you want it to be.
Frightened people look for scapegoats.
Complaining about nothing doesn’t seem like coping to you, but okay.
They ask to touch her hair and she asks to touch theirs back. This makes them all realize how strange and silly a request that is, and they giggle and become instant friends without a head petted between them.
Choose how your nature shapes you. Embrace it. Find the strength in it.
You offered him a hand to help him up, not realizing he weighed of diamond bones and ancient tales untold.
Life endures. It doesn’t need to do so enthusiastically.
Once, after all, I believed I was the finest tool ever created by a great civilization. Now, I have learned that I am a mistake cobbled together by paranoid thieves who were terrified of their own mediocrity.
It is so easy to have principles. Far, far harder to live by them.
Orogene.” It’s petty, maybe. Because of Ykka’s insistence on making rogga a use-caste name, all the stills are tossing the word around like it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not petty. It means something. “Not ‘rogga.’ You don’t get to say ‘rogga.’ You haven’t earned that.
The grief does not feel like what you feel about Uche, or Corundum, or Innon; those are rents in your soul that still seep blood. The loss of Alabaster is simply... a thinning of who you are.
Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.
Oree,” she would say whenever I sought to prove my independence, “it’s all right to need help. All of us have things we can’t do alone.
Just because they want to kill her is no reason to forget her manners.
All things change in a Season – and some part of you is tired, finally, of the lonely, vengeful woman narrative.
True dreamers are both geniuses and madmen. Most lands can tolerate only a few, and those die young.