Ryan Graudin Quotes

Why, yes. I am a strange wonder. The most special of snowflakes! Born out of time, forever running to catch up to it!

Hope. A strange word. In her past, it had been a light, wispy thing. Crushed as easily as a finger under a guard's boot. But now...now hope weighed so much, as if the Colosseum itself had collapsed on top of her. Mortar and suffering. Brick and time.

But this...her...she's more than warmth. She's fire, a soul, a name. Mei Yee reverbs through my head, my veins. Lodges like shrapnel in the far reaches of my chest. More powerful than a pound of C-4. Uncontrollable.

Who do you love the most?" It seemed like a dangerous query, the way it was asked: razored syllables, hungry breath beating, beating against the black. "Myself

The wolves of war are gathering. They sing a song of rotten bones.

Death - the aftermath of it - is a strange thing to watch from the pedestal of immortality. I've seen death in every way: as a thief in the night, as the heat of fever, as the lust of a warrior. Yet I've never really understood grief, or what it does to those left behind.

But seeing Richard alone in the dark. It breaks away pieces of me. I'm a glacier, plunging, falling apart against the sea.

Monsters cut children open and call it progress. Monsters murder entire groups of people without blinking but get upset when they have to wash human ash from their garden strawberries. Monsters are the ones who watch other people do these things and do nothing to stop it.

Even at their most basic function, needles do two things: They give and they take away.

I am Farway Gaius McCarthy, son of Empra McCarthy. Birth date unavailable. With timelessness in my blood and nowhere calling to my heart

Here was a people. A family. A faith.
Her people. Her family. Her faith.
Here was a silence broken.

A different voice slid through the speakers now--his voice. The one that raised armies, toppled kingdoms. The one that sent the entire stadium into a hush. Even the raindrops hung back in the sky; the air cleared into a spitting drizzle." p65

The world was not just moving. It was alive.
And it was ready to fight.

He wanted to meet history face-to-face. He wanted to be the blood in its veins, as it was in his

Once upon a different time, there was a girl who lived in a kingdom of death. Wolves howled up her arm. A whole pack of them--made of tattoo ink and pain, memory and loss. It was the only thing about her that ever stayed the same.

Chaos was inevitable. Might as well roll with it

Yael was a cobweb version, composed of gaps and strings and fragile nothings.

All secrets sound the same in the dark.

It will take time to heal. Just like all the others.

Time flies when you're plundering history

He did not make me. He did not break me.

These were the names she whispered in the dark.
These were the pieces she brought back into place.
These were the wolves she rode to war.

This is my world. Wide and open and waiting.

The moreness of him was beginning to show. The way ruins were excavated by an archaeologist. Brushstroke by brushstroke. Bit by bit.

Are you you without your memories? If not, who do you become?

Cassiopeia? She was a queen long ago, in a different part of the world. The stories say she was very beautiful, but very proud. Too proud. She smack-talked some goddesses and got herself stuck up there for all eternity.

It never made sense to my young mind, how a hurt from so long ago could keep a man from walking right. Stay with him for the rest of his life. But now that I am older, now that I've fought my own wars and fired my own guns, I understand.

All these skills I've taught you--they're burdens. Not gifts. Taking a life takes something from me. When you choose to kill, make sure it is for the right reasons. Make sure the decision is something you can live with.

The loss inside him kept piling - vertebrae shattered, finger bones lost, gravestone past and guillotine future, ghost woman and her ghost curls,

Hope could not outlast the breather. Love, however . . . Love was something not even death could conquer, because at the end of everything, even life, he was hers.

Fear is not an excuse," Yael told him. "Fear is being human.

But their roots went deep, bound them together in a collective memory. With each new arrival, they pieced together more of their past, built more of their future.

So she traced and she named. She hurt and she raged. She remembered.