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This close to the end of the day, she lost the ability to modulate her naturally abrupt manner for the comfort of others.
Aster was always memorizing new ways of being with people.
There was no sense mourning that which no longer nourished.
“You’re one of those who has to tune the world out and focus on one thing at a time. We have a word for that down here, women like you. Insiwa. Inside one. It means you live inside your head and to step out of it hurts like a caning.”
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“I don’t understand how burning something I find valuable will feel good,”
jest whenever the mood struck, regardless of appropriateness.
She’d thought she’d trained her mind out of its predisposition toward excessive literalism, but there it was, persistent as ever, making a fool of her.
Inexplicable, painful death seemed a fitting magnum opus to Sovereign Nicolaeus’s career as Matilda’s head.
The precisionist in her hated oral history and memory and that flimsy, haphazard way people spoke about the past.
They offered summary and conclusion where there were none, by grouping data that should not necessarily be grouped.
Do not assign meaning where there is none.
“The point is what you do when you don’t have the details. Do you interrogate? Do you examine? Or do you settle for the obvious answer?”
Any random assortment of dots could be connected into a picture, whether there was an actual picture there or not.
The whole point of occupying a position of power was that you got to do what you wanted with impunity. It seemed a waste of time to bother with rationalizations.
Your version of clarifying never actually clarifies a thing.”
Signs, however, didn’t rely on the existence of the supernatural. History wanted to be remembered. Evidence hated having to live in dark, hidden places and devoted itself to resurfacing. Truth was messy. The natural order of an entropic universe was to tend toward it. That’s what ghosts really are, Aint Melusine had said, the past refusing to be forgot.
Ghosts is smells, stains, scars. Everything is ruins. Everything is a clue. It wants you to know its story. Ancestors are everywhere if you are looking.
Everything dies, so exert control by burning it away yourself. Everything will be born again anyway. There’s no such thing as creation, merely a shuffling of parts. All birth is rebirth in disguise.
“If you’re trying to rile me, which I suspect that you are, you’ll have to do better than accusing me of something as banal as self-stimulation.”
Death ends a issue. A fight makes it fester on and on. I taught you better than to open doors you can’t close.”
Not everything that’s important looks important,
An acquaintance this old that has never bloomed into friendship never will, and it’s hardly worth the upkeep and maintenance required.”
Their partnership revolved around sewing up each other’s various wounds.
She hadn’t known what she’d find on the other side of the mystery, but she’d risked everything seeking it out anyway.
He would disown me, and that heartens me. I have done at least one good thing: become a person my father would hate.
That is the exact opposite reason why it upsets me when he calls me things that mean boy.
Aster tells me she thinks I was hurt so badly that the only way I could go on was to pretend so hard that it didn’t exist until it was true, but what happened still lives in my body, like a witch’s curse.
I saw him drown a whole litter once, and I think he meant to drown me too. Conform or die. That was his motto. I am oddly doing bits of both, each half-assedly.
tributes shouldn’t be perfect imitations.
I am not that sort of man. The sort to follow a woman into the brush and do with her whatever pleases him. I don’t think I’m a man at all.
People do not know what to make of me, and this pleases me. I don’t want to be scrutable.
Because I am an anomaly, because they see me as someone holy, they can tolerate my differences.
Too much of my day is spent decoding euphemisms, then dealing with the aftermath when I decode them wrong.”
Aster had not met an upperdeck woman quite so showy before, and she seemed to be playing a part.
“Night Empress,” Aster said, despite knowing this was make-believe.
“You got blood and viscera on me,” she added, though it was only a small amount.
Her meanness was pure, forged from pain. It was a cruelty Aster could understand if not always tolerate. She would always forgive a bitter, scarred thing lashing out.
Ritual cleaning was a standard part of many religious practices, and though Theo seemed to perform these acts more often than what was typical, his dedication seemed within the realm of reason. But in time, Aster saw his piousness as something more. Belief played a part in it, but so did compulsion.
Pathologically inclined to blame himself for every wrong thing about the world, he thought that if he just fasted for the right number of days, recited his verses at the right times, he might be able to stop some of the bad.
there was never trusting a man who was son of a sovereign, nor was there trusting any man at all, or any woman, or anyone. Aster had softened to him more after piecing together the details of his life. He was the Sovereign’s bastard child by a lowdeck woman, and he hated the Sovereignty even more than she did.
“And you’d be wise not to concern yourself with what I should and shouldn’t do, as you aren’t me, and therefore aren’t qualified to make such judgments.”
“As far as one accepts intellect as a valid category by which to organize people—and I’m not sure that I do.
Everything left a trace, but sometimes a trace was not enough. “I feel like I am chasing a figment of someone else’s imagination,”
A scientist, Aster had learned something Giselle had not: decoding the past was like decoding the physical world. The best that could be hoped for was a working model. A reasonable approximation. That was to say, no matter what Aster learned of Lune, there was no piecing together the full mystery of her life. There was no hearing her laugh or feeling her embrace. A ghost is not a person.
did. It was hard to imagine the dead having adventures. It was hard to imagine her as a person at all.
Matilda used the magnets when she needed to change direction, drawing on the ship’s internal power to activate them. That was what caused the blackouts.
They were all such weak, soft things. Chalk.
Aster wanted to be one of those women who could bear lonesomeness well.
She missed Brer Boar more than she’d missed the worlds.
