A Torch Against the Night (An Ember in the Ashes, #2)

by Sabaa Tahir

“Sly one! You ask what am I, but what are you?”

“You will hunt Elias. You will find him. For what you learn on that journey—about yourself, your land, your enemies—that knowledge is essential to the Empire’s survival. And to your destiny.”

“Don’t look so worried. Most successful missions are just a series of barely averted disasters.”

“Your emotions make you human,” Elias says. “Even the unpleasant ones have a purpose. Don’t lock them away. If you ignore them, they just get louder and angrier.”

“Always so afraid of the darkness within.” Mamie takes my hands. “Don’t you see? So long as you fight the darkness, you stand in the light.”

Few people want witnesses to their pain, and grief is the worst pain of all.

“Most people,” Cain says, “are nothing but glimmers in the great darkness of time. But you, Helene Aquilla, are no swift-burning spark. You are a torch against the night—if you dare to let yourself burn.”

True suffering lies in the expectation of pain as much as in the pain itself.”

Failure doesn’t define you. It’s what you do after you fail that determines whether you are a leader or a waste of perfectly good air.”

It takes only a split second for life to go horribly wrong. To fix the mess, I need a thousand things to go right. The distance from one bit of luck to the next feels as great as the distance across oceans. But, I decide in this moment, I will bridge that distance, again and again, until I win. I will not fail.

sane plans never work, girl,” she says. “Only the mad ones do.”