Full Fathom Five (Craft Sequence, #3)

by Max Gladstone

Cast a shadow complex enough, and one day it will look up. One day it will tear free from the wall to seek the one who gave it form.

She did not drink the light around her, or wrong the ground on which she stood, or crackle with eldritch sorcery.

Love this description of craftspeople.

“I came here to get drunk and pity myself. Without the second what’s the point of the first?”

“‘Patronizing’s’ an interesting word. You think I’m acting like I’m your father, or like you’re a rich idiot who needs to be told what’s what about art?” “Both, I guess.”

two open-air restaurants perched like Telomiri duelists across the courtyard from each other, Fabrice’s and Escalier, and she imagined the maître d’ of each concocting mad plots to ensnare or embarrass his rival, escalating until the hotel burned down in a cascade of envy and charred timber.

Can we get a spinoff book about this?

Don’t wait for them to come for you with the knives and hot irons. This isn’t fate. There’s no such thing.

You may be broken, but don’t let them see you breaking.

My mantra

Fear had helped him find his voice before fear and pain honed away his lesser elements until he became a single sound. Where could he find that fear again? In the spotlight. In the heat. In standing blank minded onstage.

You could grab a drunk’s or gambler’s soulstuff no problem: their spirits flowed outside their skin. Artists were the same way, and musicians, and priests.

“It’s not like the world comes down to one neat choice—help myself or help other folks. Survival and duty. More like, every day we make a hundred little choices, and sometimes they contradict.

You ever wonder if anesthetic stops you from feeling pain, or just makes you forget it after?”

Well I fucking do now!

caffeine buzzed through her blood and burned behind her eyeballs. Perfect attitude for work. Easier to solve problems when you could direct the full weight of your messed-up life against them.

Humans hid their goals within a mess of flesh and lies.

Gross

You know the drill. Paperwork, demons, more paperwork because of the demons.”

Must be Tuesday.

“Would you like to come inside,” she said. It wasn’t a question. For a sentence to be a question, you had to care about the other person’s answer.

“No, it is. It’s funny because their dog, see, it’s really big, so it eats more than the rest of the family.”

Omg is "Marmaduke" a common ground between universes?!

Gods, I love sports. All the excitement of real news, only it doesn’t matter so you don’t have to worry about it.”

He was all arm, and easy to twist.

Twilling sounded genuine and superficial at once, as if he had read books about empathizing with employees and almost understood them.

He hoped to offer friendly biographers no embarrassments, and unfriendly biographers no ammunition.

“Even if you live sixty years on one block, the block moves around you.”

She placed her hands beneath the spider head and pushed; at first, Kai thought she meant to tear her head loose, but the spider-seeming came off like a mask, revealing Ms. Kevarian’s face beneath. The Craftswoman tucked the spider head under one arm, summoned a mirror from dreams, and checked her hair. Nodding, she dissolved the mirror.

Shit like this is why Elayne Kevarian is my favorite.

“This is your nightmare. I can do nothing here that does not come from your own mind.” “My mind scares me.” “You’re a wise woman,” she said,

If your own mind doesn’t scare you, you’re lying to yourself.

“This is a trap.” “Life is a trap,” she said.

Justice is like math: anyone can think she knows the answer, but not every answer is right.

Drowning sailors on the battered raft of her mind threw sacrifices to the adrenaline storm:

An exchange of names was an exchange of power. Without names you filed other people into boxes: murderer, conspirer, betrayer, lover, friend.

A skeleton in sunglasses reclined in a lounge chair, tanning mirror angled toward his face.

Lol why is a skeleton tanning?!

Simple accident: a zombie-crewed containership from Southern Kath wrecked in a storm. The containership had been hired to transport a horror from beyond the stars, but the horror broke free and twisted a few hundred miles of Kathic coastline into unearthly geometries before the Coast Guard caught it.

I love how casually stuff like this just gets brought up in these books

But if we threw out every kid who thought they were god’s gift to whatever, we’d be short geniuses in a decade or so. So what are we to do?”

She was change. She was nothing. She was becoming. But what was it that changed? What was it that became?

“You do not frighten us. We have allies.” “You do not,” she said. “You have clients.

There’s a difference.

Jace turned to her, and she took a step back when she saw his face. She had expected fury. She didn’t know what she saw: a slow shattering expression, a life stripped bare. He’d built a veneer of confidence over years of making what he thought were right decisions. With that scoured away, what remained wasn’t even fear.

That’s actually devastating.

Every book’s a journey—sometimes you go to Hawaii, sometimes you go to Mordor. For this book I did a bit of both.

Haha accurate description of the setting from the acknowledgements.