City of Miracles (The Divine Cities, #3)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

All political careers end in failure. Some careers are long, some are short. Some politicians fail gracefully, and peacefully—others, less so. But beloved or hated, powerful or weak, right or wrong, effective or irrelevant—eventually, eventually, all political careers end in failure.

What a crime it is that creatures of hope and justice fade from this world, he thinks, while those like me live on.

Change is a slow flower to bloom. Most of us will not see its full radiance. We plant it not for ourselves, but for future generations. But it is worth tending to. Oh, it is so terribly worth tending to.

The powers that be play their war games. And we pawns and grunts, we struggle among the trenches to stay alive. If things had gone but a bit differently, it could be you chained up here, and me with the knife.”

People don’t change. Nations don’t change. They get changed. Reluctantly. And not without a fight.

“It was probably better,” he says. “You probably had a toilet.” “Ah. Well, yes. That certainly puts things in perspective.

It is a fool who lives his life believing the waves upon which he sails shall remember him. The seas know nothing. This makes them beautiful. And this makes them terrible.

lot more about such weaponry. You said

“Yes,” says Sigrud. “But ‘fair’ is but a word.”

Youths are such a danger, I find. You must watch them carefully: if unemployment or the poverty rate ticks up too high among a nation’s youths, that’s when the trouble starts. Young people congregate too much, feel too much, and know so little of life, so they don’t know what they have to lose. It’s wisest to distract them, keep them engaged with something else, until they grow old and lose that wild fire in their hearts. Or use them, if you can. The young are eager to find a cause, and nobly die for it—it’s just a matter of finding the cause that works in your favor. And before you point it out: yes, this is something I have personally learned within my own family.

Violence is a part of our trade, yes. It is one tool of many. But violence is a tool that, if you use it but once, it begs you to use it again and again. And soon you will find yourself using it against someone undeserving of it.

“One should not seek ugliness in this world. There is no lack of it. You will find it soon enough, or it will find you.”

It is a firearm, after all. It is a tool designed to do one thing. Just as one might fear a mechanized saw, it is reasonable to fear a firearm. But you cannot let your fear of the thing keep you from operating it, or operating it well.”

“What puzzles the dead are,” says Taty. She looks away into the wilderness. “They take so much of themselves with them, you’re not even sure who you’re mourning.

Down in the dark, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson tries to rekindle his many grievances, hoping they will keep him warm enough to keep moving—a mental exercise he is deeply familiar with.

To acknowledge that you are alone is to be truly alone.

In the Divine days it was the purpose of the gods to shape the reality of the world’s citizens. The gods are gone. But this need remains. Now it is the task of governments to tell their citizens what reality is, to define it for them. For citizens are, by and large, wholly incapable of doing this for themselves.

“Perhaps the only way to truly clean a slate,” she says furiously, “is with blood.”

“It’s unfair that the dead leave us,” she says. “But it’s worse that they never really go away.”

“Anger is a hard thing to live with, Tatyana. I think sometimes we are not punished for our anger—we are punished by it, I think.”

My definition of an adult is someone who lives their life aware they are sharing the world with others. My definition of an adult is someone who knows the world was here before they showed up and that it’ll be here well after they walk away from it. My definition of an adult, in other words, is someone who lives their life with a little fucking perspective.

What a tremendous sin impatience is, he thinks. It blinds us to the moment before us, and it is only when that moment has passed that we look back and see it was full of treasures.

“To live with hatred,” says Sigrud, “is like grabbing hot embers to throw them at someone you think an enemy. Who gets burned the worst?”

“A better world comes not in a flood,” sighs Ivanya, “but with a steady drip, drip, drip. Yet it feels at times that every drop is bought with sorrow and grief. It ruins us.”

“We don’t get to choose many things. What happens to us, if we live or die, or who we love. But we can at least choose to admit, sometimes, that things are good. And sometimes, that is enough.”

“If one were to protest all the injustices of life,” says Sigrud, “great and small, one would have no time for living.”

That’s the real enemy, time. We race against it, then try and slow its arrival.”

“I will be different.” “How many tragedies follow those words,” says Olvos quietly.

Battle never changes, he thinks. Always about territory and terrain. And now, if we are lucky, to take some from our enemy.

“But I would hardly be the first parent to present themselves to their children as they wished themselves to be, rather than as they are.”

I keep waking up in the night, panicked, and thinking only—what if they’re just like us? What if our children aren’t any better? What if they’re just like us?

Pick up all the weapons of all realities and use them all as best you can, Taty, but you cannot inflict virtue on the world. You cannot.”