The Aeronaut's Windlass (The Cinder Spires, #1)

by Jim Butcher

“The heart of democracy is violence, Miss Tagwynn,” Esterbrook said. “In order to decide what to do, we take a count of everyone for and against it, and then do whatever the larger side wishes to do. We’re having a symbolic battle, its outcome decided by simple numbers. It saves us time and no end of trouble counting actual bodies—but don’t mistake it for anything but ritualized violence. And every few years, if the person we elected doesn’t do the job we wanted, we vote him out of office—we symbolically behead him and replace him with someone else. Again, without the actual pain and bloodshed, but acting out the ritual of violence nonetheless. It’s actually a very practical way of getting things done.”

“By the way, we’re at war as of an hour ago. I didn’t think it was worth waking you for.”

“I say that you are a manipulative son of a bitch, sire.” “Each and every day of the week,” Lord Albion replied, nodding.

“Rowl, my friend, you are at times a perfect little monster.” Rowl gave his tail a disdainful flick. “I am a perfect everything.”

“I know all of those words, and yet when strung together like that I have no idea what they mean.”

A wonderful place, the mind, but if it has any kind of disappointing failure, it’s that it always attempts to put new things into the context of things which are already familiar to it.

The older you get, I should think, the more you will come to understand that the universe is very much a looking glass, Miss Lancaster.” “Meaning what, precisely?” “That it reflects a great deal more of yourself to your senses than you probably know.”

When one assumed, one quite frequently was correct, but it was hardly a constant.

“In my experience, the worst madmen don’t seem odd at all,” Grimm said. “They appear to be quite calm and rational, in fact. Until the screaming starts.”

“It’s a tradition,” Grimm said. “Were traditions rational, they’d be procedures.”

Grimm had no doubt that she would order the execution of Miss Tagwynn and Miss Folly with no more emotional investment than she might show when asking for another cup of tea.

Each creature had something it excelled at, he supposed. Humans could manage knots easily, and cats could do everything else.