Don’t look back,” Schaffa advises. “It’s easier that way.” So she doesn’t. Later, she will realize he was right about this, too. Much later, though, she will wish that she had done it anyway.
The Darren language has a word for the attraction one feels to danger: esui. It is esui that makes warriors charge into hopeless battles and die laughing. Esui is also what draws women to lovers who are bad for them – men who would make poor fathers, women of the enemy.
And Mother does not hate her; actually, she fears Damaya. Is there a difference? Maybe.
You’re right,” he says. “I’ve been crazy for years. If you stay with me for long, you will be, too. If you see enough of this, and understand enough of what it all means.” He lets out a long sigh.
They have never believed us human, but we will prove by our actions today that we are more than tools. Even if we aren’t human, we are people. They will never be able to deny us this again.
Now you know that miracles are a matter of just effort, just perception, and maybe just magic.
Suffering is part of life,” she said. “All the parts of life are jumbled up together; you can’t separate out just the one thing.
Wealth has no value when the ash falls.
When a comm builds atop a faultline, do you blame its walls for crushing the people inside when they inevitably crumble? Some worlds are built upon a faultline of pain, held stable – temporarily – by nightmare walls. Don’t lament when they fall apart. Lament that they were ever built in the first place.
There’s truth even in tainted knowledge, if one reads carefully.” “Only if one knows the knowledge is tainted in the first place.
Too many New Yorkers are New York. Its acculturation quotient is dangerously high.
The days which bracketed hurricanes were painful in their clarity, sharp edge clouds, blue sky hard as a cop’s eyes.
No voting on who gets to be people.
It was too much for him, the knowledge that all of this had happened before. That he was the scion of a people abused; that those people’s forebears were, too, in their turn; that the world as he knew it could not function without forcing someone into servitude.
I definitely haven’t been in the best place while working on this book, but I can say this much: Where there is pain in this book, it is real pain; where there is anger, it is real anger; where there is love, it is real love. You’ve been taking this journey with me, and you’re always going to get the best of what I’ve got. That’s what my mother would want.
Veneza is so much of what Bronca could have been, if she’d come up in a better world – and so much of what Bronca is now, because the world is still a goddamn shitshow.
I’m alive. Oh, God. I cry for a little while. Mama’s boyfriend ain’t here to slap me and say I’m not a man for it. Daddy would’ve said it was okay – tears mean you’re alive – but Daddy’s dead. And I’m alive.
Imprisonment of orogenes was never the only option for ensuring the safety of society... Lynching was never the only option. The nodes were never the only option. All of these were choices. Different choices have always been possible.
He’s never hurt you, though. The world has, but not him. Maybe the world deserved to be destroyed.
It wasn’t a foul mood, it was the privilege that age had bought her, to dispense with the lie of politeness.