Jade City (The Green Bone Saga, #1)

by Fonda Lee

“Nothing good’s coming, when the dogs start disappearing from the streets.”

She could ask anything of him and he would do it.

Unleashing proper Strength would break the bricks, but exerting Steel would prevent him from being burned by the blistering hot clay.

A truly skilled Green Bone, of the kind Anden and all his classmates desired to be, could call upon any of the six disciplines—Strength, Steel, Perception, Lightness, Deflection, and Channeling—at any time.

“A man who wears the crown of a king can’t wear the jade of a warrior. Gold and jade, never together. We Green Bones live by aisho. We defend the country from its enemies and the weak from the strong.”

There needs to be a balance of power.”

Seems extremely relevant to politics of today..

“People are like horses, Andy. Fingers and Fists too—everyone. Any old horse will run when it’s whipped, but only fast enough to avoid the whipping,” Hilo said. “Racehorses, though, they run because they look at the horse on their left, they look at the one on their right, and they think, No way am I second to these fuckers.”

you give a man something to live up to, you tell him he can be more than he is now, more than other people think he’ll ever be, and he’ll try his godsdamned best to make it true.”

Every piece of jade gained was like an improvement on the realness of the world, the power he had over his own body and everything around it.

“Expectations are a funny thing,” Wen said. “When you’re born with them, you resent them, fight against them. When you’ve never been given any, you feel the lack of them your whole life.”

If heart alone could win the war, we’d already be victorious. But he was never meant to be Pillar. He’s not farsighted or politically shrewd, and all the jade in the world won’t change that.”

Two strong-minded women in a man’s world, if they do not quickly become allies, are destined to be incurable rivals.

The air held the quality of a taut bowstring, of the blade before it falls, of the space between hammer and pin.

“This is an orgy of pigs in shit,”

“What’s giving you such a hard on, that you have to tell me?”