More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Summer had barely begun and already the city of Janloon was like a spent lover—sticky and fragrant.
Jade made you somebody.
it—only a full-blooded Abukei native, immune to jade, could palm a gem and walk out of a crowded restaurant without giving himself away.
Talk is never just talk.
It’s important to be alone with your thoughts sometimes.”
“Jade is death for people like you. You steal it, you smuggle it, you wear it—it all ends the same way: with you feeding the worms.”
“I don’t remember stupidity being an excuse around here when I was a kid.”
The Tems were part of the powerful and sprawling Mountain clan. They were a proud family of Green Bones, but Tem Ben was a stone-eye. It happened sometimes—recessive genetics combined to produce a Kekonese child as unresponsive to jade as any Abukei native.
“Show me how green you are.”
Gonna check what is this mean
“Jade amplifies what you have inside you. What you intend.”
“Without intention, no amount of jade will make you powerful.”
Hilo was the stronger of the two Kaul brothers.
True love, Hilo mused, was sensual and euphoric, but also painful and tyrannical, demanding obedience.
Lifelong habits persisted, after all.
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.
I’m not like my father. I break from tradition when I see that there is cause to do so and when there is gain to be had. I believe differences can be overcome; disagreements in the past can be set aside.
“Gold and jade, never together.”
“A man who wears the crown of a king can’t wear the jade of a warrior. Gold and jade, never together.
We defend the country from its enemies and the weak from the strong.”
“On my honor, my life, and my jade.”
“Far do your enemies flee, Kaul-jen,”
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.”
“Sometimes, Andy, the people you think you can count on, they let you down in a bad way, and that’s hard to take. But for the most part, 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.”
“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.”
Two strong-minded women in a man’s world, if they do not quickly become allies, are destined to be incurable rivals.
