Daniel Abraham Quotes

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)

When you start talking about killed friends and lost babies, justice and revenge are two names for the same dog.

The weapon is poison,' Kit said. 'I believe that the cause we carry it in is just, but that will not protect you. It is not only death to those whose skin it cuts; it holds a deeper violence within it. If you carry it-just that, carry it and nothing more-the poison will still affect you. In time, you will grow ill from it, and eventually, inevitably, it will kill you.'
'It's a sword, Kit,' Marcus said, lifting the green scabbard from it's place. They're all like that.

Death, however clearly foretold, still came unexpectedly.

As far as I can tell, life's just one flaming piece of shit after another, except when it's a bunch of them all at once. But

In a better world, he thought, I'd have followed that man to hell.

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 it.

We say that flowers return every spring, but that is a lie. It is true that the world is renewed. It is also true that that renewal comes at a price, for even if the flower grows from an ancient vine, the flowers of spring are themselves new to the world, untried and untested.
The flower that wilted last year is gone. Petals once fallen are fallen forever. Flowers do not return in the spring, rather they are replaced. It is in this difference between returned and replaced that the price of renewal is paid.
And as it is for spring flowers, so it is for us.

Court games aren't fair. They don't judge men by their worth, and they aren't about what's just. Guilty men can hold power their whole lives and be wept for when they pass. Innocent men can be spent like coins because it's convenient. You don't have to have sinned for them to ruin you. If your destruction is useful to them, you'll be destroyed.

It was the fate of all reforms that they turned against the reformers.

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 distance.

Never assume you can survive the future because you've survived the past. Everyone thinks that, and they've all been wrong eventually.

And may the gods keep us from a world where only the people who deserve love get it.

Alle dead man are at peace. That's what makes them dead.

Words are empty until you fill them, and how you fill them shapes the world.

Words can so often mean what you take from them rather than what was intended.

I'm saying there is evil in the world," Master Kit said, hefting the box on his hip, "and doubt is the weapon that guards against it.

I've never see God," Yardem said.
"But you believe in him," Master Kit said.
"I'm reserving judgement.

We say our souls want joy, but they don't," she said. "They want what they already know, joyful or not.

To lose everything is not the worst can happen."
"It's starting again, from nothing, with nothing," Otah said.
"Is exactly this," Maj agreed, then a moment later. "Starting again, and doing better.

I find that unless we are very, very careful there can be a difference between who we are and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. I

Losing everything was still losing everything, however little someone began with.

Over the proof that someone can be both certain and wrong. In my mind, I began to reserve judgment even on the revelations of the goddess. I cultivated the word probably. Was the temple swept? Yes, probably. But perhaps not. The goddess was eternal and just and immune to all lies, probably. We were her beloved and chosen, probably. But perhaps we weren't. I became very aware of the division between truth and certainty. I began to doubt. And once I was on that path, there was no hiding it.

We drink to the gods," Amiit said, raising his bowl. "May they never drink to us.

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 than justice," Seedless said.
"Sometimes. Yes."
Seedless smiled and nodded.
"What a terrible thought," he said. "That love and injustice should be married.

In the past few days, I have stolen a girl from the workhouses by killing her, hauling her body out of the river, and bringing her back to life; worked with an acknowledged mass murderer, no offense - " "None taken." " - to poison and enslave two agents of the law; and performed glorious if intoxicated sexual acts with my dearest friend's lover on a corpse table." "Busy." "It has occurred to me that I may not be a good person." "I have no insight to offer on the question.

Just because something's a game, doesn't mean it isn't serious.

You have all the time there is between right now and whenever it's too late.

In the thousand years since its foundation, the city had never been taken by force, though twice it had been seduced.

Waiting for a battle was the hardest part. Unless you got a dagger in your gut during the battle. Then that was hardest. Or you got through just fine and saw your men dead around you. Then that was.

How did you find out?" "I listened. I lied. The normal things anyone would do who wanted to know something hidden.

I think the world is often like that." "Like what?" "Comic, but only at the right distance.

I find a certain value in lightness.

To lose everything is not the worst that can happen."
"It's starting again, from nothing, with nothing.

There's ways you can trust an enemy you can't always trust a friend. An enemy's never going to betray your trust.

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 waited for people we trusted, I think we might never love anyone.

It doesn't matter what you've done or seen. Every man's a child until he's a father. It's the way the world's made.

Has it ever struck you people how arrogant you are?" it asked, huge hands taking an attitude of query that bordered on accusation. "You're talking of slaughtering a nation. Thousands of innocent people destroyed, lands made barren, mountains leveled and the sea pulled up over them like a blanket. And you're feeling sorry for yourself that you had to wring a bird's neck as a boy? How can anyone have feelings that delicate and that numbed both at the same time?

Children are who they are. I may love them all, but I know them too. Their feet are as much clay as my own. It hardly matters what path we've walked to become what we are. Whatever it was, we've walked it.

Every war was the precursor for the wars that followed, a slaughter that justified the slaughters to come. And

Objective truth is difficult to come by, and even if you have it, what you can pass on to the next person is the story that you tell about it. In order for truth to be recognized as true, it has to be wrapped in plausibility. Just the same as lies. (Another Word: Plausibility and Truth

That's one of the things Yardem used to tell me that actually made sense. He said that you don't go through grief like it was a chore to be done. You can't push and get finished quicker. The best you can do is change the way you always do, and the time comes when you aren't the same person who was in pain.

Every nation ends and every empire. Every baby born was going to die, given enough time. If being fated for destruction were enough to take the joy out of things, we'd slaughter children fresh from the womb. But we don't. We wrap them in warm cloth and we sing to them and feed them milk as if it might all go on forever.

She shone like the horizon when it is almost too bright to look upon.