The Familiar

by Leigh Bardugo

“You are not in danger of dying from hard work. You think you know hardship, but men have a gift for finding new ways to make women suffer.

You think because we were dunked in water and whispered over by a priest, they consider us real Christians? We are poison to them. Something they’ve been forced to swallow that eats away at the very substance of who they are.

“Is it me you fear for or yourself?” “There is room in my large heart for us both.”

when it came to anything worth having, there was no end to more.

“Who has more power in a house than the woman who stirs the soup and makes the bread and scrubs the floors, who fills the foot warmer with hot coals, and arranges your letters, and nurses your children?”

“Fear men, Luzia,” he said. “Fear their ambition and the crimes they commit in its service. But don’t fear magic or what you may do with it.”

Men weren’t kind to the things they feared.

“Now we know each other. Let’s see what we may accomplish with fewer lies between us.”

And try not to be the fish who gets eaten.”

“All empires are the same empire to the poor and the conquered. But not all empires are the same.

The Dutch and the English will build markets for their goods, colonies for their taxes, new routes of trade. They will bleed the world for an age. Spain builds nothing, just spends its stolen wealth on wars that have no end.

In the darkness, all is one.

life lived hungry could lead you to eat from anyone’s hand.

There are different kinds of suffering, Valentina thought. The kind that takes you by surprise and the kind you live with so long, you stop noticing it.