Seth Dickinson Quotes

She had always loved the stars. But in the desert of winter it was impossible to forget that they were cold, and distant, and did not care.

Baru raised her hand to smash the wineglass. Checked herself, checked even her trembling, and stood there in absurd pantomime, too firmly in control of her anger to move, too deeply angry for anything but stillness.

Among societies with only two sexes, they often chose to pass as a man or a woman, and became expert at it.

She moved and spoke decisively, sometimes with a certain impatience, as if the world dragged two steps behind her will and she found the friction grating.

The terror that took Baru came from the deepest part of her soul. It was a terror particular to her, a fundamental concern - the apocalyptic possibility that the world simply did not permit plans, that it worked in chaotic and unmasterable ways, that one single stroke of fortune, one well-aimed bowshot by a man she had never met, could bring total disaster. The fear that the basic logic she used to negotiate the world was a lie. Or, worse, that she herself could not plan: that she was as blind as a child, too limited and self-deceptive to integrate the necessary information, and that when the reckoning between her model and the pure asymbolic fact of the world came, the world would devour her like a cuttlefish snapping up bait.

Her fury had nothing else to eat and so it began to eat her.

With the discipline of the body comes discipline of the soul.

Salt and citrus," Cairdine Farrier said, joining her at the stern with a lemon in each hand. "The chemicals of empire."
"Salt to preserve food for long journeys," Baru recited. "Citrus for scurvy.

Everyone was someone else's instrument. But she would have to take him into confidence and use him as a trusted instrument nonetheless.

There was nowhere in the world, Baru thought, no collection of lords or lovers, that did not have its own politics.

Do not do her work for her. Do not build her up in your mind. She's only one woman.

It's hard to find good stories now.

It's not what the Masquerade does to you that you should you fear, she wanted to tell Ake. It's what the Masquerade convinces you to do to yourself.

Freedom granted by your rulers is just a chain with a little slack.

And he looked at her with open eyes, the bone of his heavy brow a bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth.

This is the truth. You will know because it hurts.

Men used to marry men. And women once took wives. It was done by the poor, the starving, the desperate, by those who needed a business pact or a shared roof. By soldiers on campaign with no one else to turn to. Mostly in was done by those without needs or troubles - done for love. The words tribadist and sodomite, the things they mean and define, came later. Before those words there were only people.

She chose when and where she would die. She chose the meaning of her death, and she chose the method. Rare is that gift, isn't it? Rare is the choice to write the end of your own story.

I am Baru Cormorant," she protested, "accountant.

If the Masquerade could not be stopped by spear or treaty, she would change it from within.

Tain Shir walks the deck of RNS Sulane between the bombs and incendiaries and steel-tipped barbs. A weapon among weapons but she alone is free. The tragedy of the knife is the hilt. The tragedy of the crossbow is the trigger. Shir has neither. She cannot be gripped nor fired.
She is unmastered.
The sailors are rude with her. So be it. Etiquitte is the domain of those whose power is conditional upon the respect of others, and Shir is unconditional. If she drifted alone in the void beyond the moon or if she walked among the monarchs of the ancient Cheetah Palaces she would not be altered in her capabilities or her intentions, for not one truth of her resides within a relationship to any other thing.

Empire planted that killing tree on Kyprananoke, where the rebels dashed children dead against the trunk.
The only answer to empire is to move the tree.
It is not justice. But there is no such thing as justice. Only the measureless and asymbolic truth. Who prospers. Who suffers. Who lives in glory. Who dies in chains.

I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.

Money is only one kind of power. Faith is power, too. Love is power. Slaughter and madness are both roads to power. Certainly, symbols are power – you wear one wherever you go, that purse you carry. And you wear others when you decide to dress yourself, how to look at men and women, how to carry your body and direct your gaze. And all these symbols can raise people to labour or war.

Her thoughts ran in cannibal circles.

The tide is coming in," he said. "The ocean has reached this little pool. There will be turbulence, and confusion, and ruin. This is what happens when something small joins something vast.

Is this how you think we should fight, Baru Fisher? With coin and open roads?" "No war has ever been won by slaughtering the enemy wholesale.

The world is made of stories, which bind us all together, and impossible stories are the best of all, for they bind us in impossible ways.

Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent.

Certainly I do." He spat into the hilltop grass. "Spymasters never lie.

Without any outward sign or motion, in the wreckage of herself, she donned her armor, made it firm around her heart. Raise her mask: a cold discipline, a steel beneath her skin.
Grow comfortable, she told herself. It will never come off.

Understood what the books and the generals always repeated: that armies did not kill each other, they broke each other, that the day would be won when one army believed it could not survive. A matter of deception, of conviction, of lies made true through performance. Like everything else.

Your tactics are self-centered. You have forgotten that you are not the only player on the board, that inherent talent speaks for no more than experience, and that others around you seek to expand their authority and constrain yours.

First exhaustion, then shame, then callous cynicism. Then collapse. But I'm not there yet, I'm not past cynicism. I still want to help.

More than anything else in the universe, more than the power to dictate law at Taranoke, more than the knowledge of the count of stars in the sky, Baru wanted in that moment to speak the truth.

But she had no tongue for it. She had burnt all her truth away. Alloyed it into the machine

Better a woman of divided loyalties than one of no loyalty at all. Better a reluctant traitor than the terror of a true sociopath.

I am an accountant." Baru wished she could close her ears to the screams of the sectioned, smoking crowd. "I deal in costs, not faiths." "But you are part of this." Tain Hu was a little taller and she moved with purposeful force. Her words, no matter how soft, were not unintimidating. "This is a cost. This is the cost we pay for broad roads and hot water, for banks and new crops. This is the trade you demand." And there was no doubt who she meant, for she used Aphalone's singular you. "This resistance is meaningless," Baru said. "If they want change, they must make themselves useful to Falcrest. Find a way up from within." "A people can only bear the lash so long in silence. Some things are not worth being within.

None of it could be reduced to something as simple as invader and invaded. Baru saw in the city what she felt in herself. The two-faced allegiances, the fearful monitoring of self and surroundings, the whimpering need to please somehow kneeling alongside marrow-deep defiance. One eye set on a future of glittering wealthy subservience, the other turned to a receding and irretrievable freedom. The liquor of empire, alluring and corrosive at once, saturating everything, every old division of sex and race and history, remaking it all with the promise and the threat of power.

She liked his advise better than Pinion's, because it was full of things to accomplish now rather than things to avoid forever.

When things break underfoot, you know that you are going forward.

Your power is secret, and in secret it is total. But to use your power you must touch the world. To touch you must be touched, to be touched is to be seen, to be seen is to be known. To be known is to perish. Act subtly, lest you diminish.

I have been a servant too long. I want to help make something free.

She looked that word up too, hoping to understand it, as understanding gave her power over things.

Trust, like money, needed a guarantee to back it.