The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3)

by N.K. Jemisin

When a slave rebels, it is nothing much to the people who read about it later. Just thin words on thinner paper worn finer by the friction of history. (“So you were slaves, so what?” they whisper. Like it’s nothing.) But to the people who live through a slave rebellion, both those who take their dominance for granted until it comes for them in the dark, and those who would see the world burn before enduring one moment longer in “their place”—

Life endures. It doesn’t need to do so enthusiastically.

We do not understand that what Kelenli has come to give us is a sense of peoplehood. We do not understand why we have been forbidden this self-concept before now … but we will. And then we will understand that people cannot be possessions. And because we are both and this should not be, a new concept will take shape within us, though we have never heard the word for it because the conductors are forbidden to even mention it in our presence. Revolution.

ALL ENERGY IS THE SAME, through its different states and names.

Movement creates heat which is also light that waves like sound which tightens or loosens the atomic bonds of crystal as they hum with strong and weak forces. In mirroring resonance with all of this is magic, the radiant emission of life and death. This is our role: To weave together those disparate energies.

Orogenes are essential. And yet because you are essential, you cannot be permitted to have a choice in the matter. You must be tools—and tools cannot be people. Guardians keep the tool … and to the degree possible, while still retaining the tool’s usefulness, kill the person.”

People need other people to live. And if she has to fight to live, against every person in every comm? Against every song and every story and history and the Guardians and the militia and Imperial law and stonelore itself? Against a father who could not reconcile daughter with rogga? Against her own despair when she contemplates the gargantuan task of simply trying to be happy?

there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them—even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.

We sit at her feet, stunned, changed and changing by her words.

if you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back.”

There are stages to the process of being betrayed by your society. One is jolted from a place of complacency by the discovery of difference, by hypocrisy, by inexplicable or incongruous ill treatment. What follows is a time of confusion—unlearning what one thought to be the truth. Immersing oneself in the new truth. And then a decision must be made. Some accept their fate. Swallow their pride, forget the real truth, embrace the falsehood for all they’re worth—because, they decide, they cannot be worth much. If a whole society has dedicated itself to their subjugation, after all, then surely they deserve it? Even if they don’t, fighting back is too painful, too impossible. At least this way there is peace, of a sort. Fleetingly. The alternative is to demand the impossible. It isn’t right, they whisper, weep, shout; what has been done to them is not right. They are not inferior. They do not deserve it. And so it is the society that must change. There can be peace this way, too, but not before conflict. No one reaches this place without a false start or two.

sometimes, when the world is hard, love must be harder still.

True, no one thought of the Earth as alive in those days—but we should have guessed. Magic is the by-product of life. That there was magic in the Earth to take … We should all have guessed.)

My eyes have been opened to my own exploitation and degradation.

Life is sacred in Syl Anagist—as it should be, for the city burns life as the fuel for its glory.

She can only make choices within the limited set of her experiences, and it isn’t her fault that so many of those experiences have been terrible.

As big as the world is, Nassun is beginning to realize it’s also really small. The same stories, cycling around and around. The same endings, again and again. The same mistakes eternally repeated.