Sofia Samatar Quotes

It was "a shape to make men weep," wrote Firdred of Bain when he first saw it: "exactly the shape of a desecrated sea.

This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in every direction, irrevocable.

But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.

She ignited her heart by touching it to his; and after that there was no peace for either of them.

Sever all ties. The words in his mouth like ash. It was not the coldness of the words that horrified him, their utter opposition to anything human, but rather his own affinity for them, the way he was drawn to this vision of solitude with a feeling almost of nostalgia. He had the kind of loneliness that battles everything, that makes a person strange forever.

I sat down in the wilderness with my books, and wept for joy.

To lose a sibling is to lose the one different from you. There's no one now against whom to say: But I am like this. I am this.

His exaltation left no room for the human.

The night sky was distended in my dreams, sinking to earth with the weight of destructive glory behind it. In one of those dreams I reached up and touched it gently with a fingertip, and it burst like a yolk, releasing a deluge of light.

Long is the journey homeward, Weary and worn are we. Oh, if I fall behind, my love, Will you look back for?

All through my journey his stories had fallen like snow. He was as full of them as a library with unmarked shelves. He was a talking book.

I sat enchanted, far from my gods, adrift in the boat of spices, in the sigh of the South, in the net of the wheeling stars, in the country of dolphins.

I should die," said Ivrom. "That is blasphemy," the old man answered kindly. "I should suffer." "You are suffering, are you not?" "Not enough." "Consider the sufferings ordained by the Nameless Gods," the priest quoted. "A cupful weighs as much as an ocean." In fact - as Ivrom would discover later - a cupful weighs much more. When

These were the rains that drove people close to the walls, under the balconies, or sent them dashing madly through the squares, and drenched the fluttering ribbons and bright trappings of the horses so that their flanks were streaked with delicate watercolors. The storms washed the streets so that little streams of brown water went roaring along the gutters toward the sea, and thundered on the roofs of the cafés where people were crowded together laughing in the steam and half darkness. I loved those rains; they were of the sort that is welcomed by everyone, preceded by hot, oppressive hours of stillness; they came the way storms come in the islands but did not last as long, and often the sun came out when they had passed. I was happy whenever the rain caught me walking about in the streets, for then I would rush into the nearest café, along with all the others who were escaping from the weather, all of us crushing laughing through the doors. The rain allowed me to go anywhere, to form quick, casual friendships, forced to share one of the overcrowded tables, among the beaming waiters who pushed good-naturedly through the throngs carrying cups of steaming apple cider.

The silence had a depth to it, like the stillness after a bell has been struck and the echoes have died away, and one waits for what has been summoned.

The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured.

Her small mouth opens and closes, a cave of light. And night falls down around me like a temple of broken glass.

Once you have built something - something that takes all your passion and will - it becomes more precious to you than your own happiness. You don't realise that, while you are building it. That you are creating a martyrdom - something which, later, will make you suffer.

The truth has its own virtue, which is separate from its content.

All bleed who fight with the sword. All confront, with greater or lesser difficulty, the worship of their own flesh. The swordmaiden faces particular obstacles in this matter: she will have seen, in the temples and elsewhere, many images of unscarred women.

[h]ope, like a desert aloe. Hope, stubborn and bitter to the taste. That hides water. That bears the drought. An ugly plant with the power to heal.

The tunneling entrance curves before it opens into this space and there is absolute, waiting, coiled, and sentient blackness.

Words are sublime, and in books we may commune with the dead. Beyond this there is nothing true, no voices we can hear.