I nodded slowly, not allowing myself to feel foolish. Logic had not been part of what I’d done.
And I don’t care how they feel. They don’t have to rusting like us. What matters is what they do.
It’s always harder to fight for other people than for the self.
Maybe she failed your tests because they were the wrong tests.
Veneza laughs, tilting her head back like she’s drunk. “I’m Jersey City, goddamn it!
Sulking is petulant, pointless anger. Mine is righteous.
Mortals are the sum of many things, Sieh. They are what circumstance has made them and what they wish to be. If you must hate them, hate them for the latter, not the former. At least they have some say over that part.
It became easy for scholars to build reputations and careers around the notion that Niess sessapinae were fundamentally different, somehow – more sensitive, more active, less controlled, less civilized – and that this was the source of their magical peculiarity. This was what made them not the same kind of human as everyone else. Eventually: not as human as everyone else. Finally: not human at all.
Her fingers fly across the keyboard with the uncanny speed of anyone younger than thirty.
I found it perversely comforting that she had tried to kill me at birth.
Accuracy is sacrificed in the name of better poetry.
That we’re not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don’t have to feel bad about how they treat us.
So many of Nahadoth’s children were like her, just a little mad but beautiful in their madness.
She can’t explain it. Lines of force, lines of sight, mathematical configurations; all of the knowledge that she needs is in her mind, but cannot be reproduced by her tongue.
He knows this is true, suddenly – and he hates that this, out of the gray undifferentiated morass that is his past, is the knowledge that’s returned to him.
New Orleans stank to the heavens. This was either the water, which did not have the decency to confine itself to the river but instead puddled along every street; or the streets themselves, which seemed to have been cobbled with bricks of fired excrement. Or it may have come from the people who jostled and trotted along the narrow avenues, working and lounging and cursing and shouting and sweating, emitting a massed reek of unwashed resentment and perhaps a bit of hangover.
What we are, what we’re made of, is many worlds coming together. Reality and legends. This world where we’re just people, and that world, where we can be miles-wide cities that just happen to be sitting a couple of feet across from each other because the laws of space, physics, don’t work the same way.
But of course, Bronca herself is the Bronx, and the Bronx don’t trust nobody but the Bronx, so maybe her distaste for everyone else is just as inexorable as Manhattan’s charm.
What’s changed, that a stone eater no longer seems alien to you? Only superficial things about him. Everything about you.
Much of history is unwritten. Remember this.