Traci Chee Quotes

It was little more than a weak flame flickering under the weight of his melancholia, but it was there. A splinter of possibility. Maybe he didn't want to die.
Maybe, just maybe, he wanted to live.
It didn't burn away his sadness. It didn't make his future appear any less dark.
But it was there - hope, perhaps, or something like it - and it was enough.

Peace through war. Seems a funny way to go about it, if you ask me.

Wielding the Book proved even more difficult than Sefia had expected; the amount of information was so massive and so little of it was what she needed.

People passed stories from mouth to mouth like kisses, or plagues, until they flowed down the streets, into gutters, streams, and rivers, down to the ocean itself.

She closed her eyes. She didn't want the world. She wanted his mouth on
hers. She wanted his hands at her neck, along her back. She wanted Archer,
and, at least for tonight, absolutely nothing else.

A good leader protects his own, if you ask me.

In that moment, the nameless boy understood: This was the end. He was going to die.
He would cease to breathe. Cease to be. Cease to hurt. It would be easy.
But he didn't want to die.

In a world where the only evidence of your existence was a body subject to decay and the works you left behind when the body was gone, you tried all manner of things to convince yourself that your life had some meaning, some permanence.

Together, we can do anything.

Were they all just stories whose endings had already been written, the dates of their deaths pinned to the page with periods?

Home's what you make it." Nin shrugged. "Could be a ship. Could be what you carry around on your back day after day. Could be family. Or maybe just one person you love more than any other. That's home." The

Look towards the horizon, that's where the adventures are.

This is a book, and a book is a world, and words are the seeds in which meanings are curled. Pages of oceans and margins of land are civilizations you hold in the palm of your hand. But look at your world and your life seems to shrink to cities of paper and seas made of ink. Do you know who you are, or have you been misled? Are you the reader, or are you the read?

Were there signs for each of the stars, and grains of sand on the beach? For tree or rock or river? For home? Would they look as beautiful as they sounded, hovering in the air?

What is written comes to pass.

But books are curious objects. They have the power to trap, transport, and even transform you if you are lucky. But in the end, books - even magic ones - are only objects pieced together from paper and glue and thread. That was the fundamental truth the readers forgot. How vulnerable the book really was. To fire. To the damp. To the passage of time. And to theft.

But being smart was overrated. Being stupid and brave and curious? Now that's something stories are made of. Dimarion's

If you want to save him, you can't keep him.

What's more important, is that you survived."
"Why?"
The captain poured himself a finger of liquor and clinked their glasses. "Because survivors get to decide who the heroes are. And the villains.

You got a choice, Sef. Control your future, or let your future control you." Above,

With bones of ships and soldiers at her feet.
With blood on her hands and nothing inside.

Once there was, but it would not always be. This is the ending of every story.

Maybe someone was reading her right now, and if she looked up, she would see their eyes staring down at her, following her every move. Maybe someone was reading the reader.

Nothing was okay. And he was far from home.

It was the most terrible sound in a world of terrible sounds, the kind of sound that haunts you in the late hours of the night when the darkness shutters you in and the cold creeps into you through the cracks. When you are suddenly gripped by the unwavering certainty that you are already dead--and gone forever.

He shook his head. "Good-bye, my dear. I'm afraid the next time we meet, we'll be bitter enemies."
She clasped his hand. "Then I hope we never meet again."
Then, with a wave of her hands, she vanished.

Rovon said very seriously, looking into her eyes, "You never have to take a life, Riki. You always have a choice."
Archer folded his napkin. Almost picked a fight with his uncle. Almost walked out.
A choice?
Sometimes the choice was kill or die.

The dead no longer existed.
Except in story.
Some stories were modest in scale, existing in a single family or a small community of believers who whispered among themselves so their loved ones would not be forgotten.
Others were so powerful they would transform the very fabric of the world.

Sentiment makes fools of us all.

Survival is overrated.

If anything could be a book, there was no telling what you could learn, if you knew what to look for. Smooth river stones spelled out across a mossy floor. Lines drawn in the sand. Or inscribed on the side of a fallen log, half-obscured by twigs and mulch: This is a book.