Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)

by Ada Palmer

Yet somehow the idea warms me, that, out of every thousand lives of suffering my ancient counterparts endured, one slave was building something that his soul, if it could view all from outside of time, might call Great. It cannot wash away humanity’s great cruelties, but Fate’s cruelties, those, I think, it mitigates a little, and, for me, a little is enough.

but should a sickness be cured if makes its sufferers happier than healthy men?

by now its matchless popularity would have doomed us to that dread death-knell of peace: majority.

But let me ask you this: would you have labeled her a stay-at-home so easily had I not been reminding you with every phrase that she is a woman?

It is not her job which makes me give her the feminine pronoun, despite her testicles and chromosomes. I saw her once when someone threatened her little nephew, and the primal savagery with which those thick hands shattered the offender was unmistakably that legendary strength which lionesses, she-wolves, she-bats, she-doves, and all other ‘she’s obtain when motherhood berserks them. That strength wins her ‘she.’

I understand only enough to know that I am too small, too finite, too tiny a creation to understand why I was made the thing I was, to do the things I did.

“Do you have some problem with sex?” Carlyle: “I do when you claim to be a nun.” Heloïse: “Then you too advocate clerical celibacy?” Her voice grew bright, as if she had just discovered they shared the same home town.