City of Miracles (The Divine Cities, #3)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

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.

“Where have you been for the past decade or so?” she asks, pouring her own. “Nowhere good.” She laughs sullenly. “Doubt it was any better than where I was. Sitting in the Parliament chambers for over a decade, dealing with these little-minded fools…” “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.

To lose someone you loved is one thing. To lose someone you loved but never truly knew is another.

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.”

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.

“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.”

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.