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The metropolis strained at its seams and it felt as if all the people, Green Bones as well, strained with it. There was an undercurrent, Hilo thought, of everything running a bit too dangerously fast all the time, as if the city were an oily new machine cranked to its highest setting, teetering just on the edge of out of control, disrupting the natural order of things.
“You have to give people a chance to learn. They’re just kids after all—stupid kids.”
True love, Hilo mused, was sensual and euphoric, but also painful and tyrannical, demanding obedience.
Crossing the ocean, staring out the window at the passing expanse of blue, she’d felt as if she were turning back time—leaving behind the person she’d become in a foreign land and returning to her childhood.
The first two weeks had been almost unbearable, the feeling of being in a deprivation chamber of her own making. Everything so much less than it used to be—less color, less sound, less feeling—a washed-out dreamscape.
Hilo’s magnanimity was like his jade aura—fierce and unequivocal.
Shae had not forgotten that a single step in one direction might portend an irrevocable change in one’s path.
In some ways, Lan thought, it must have been simpler—dangerous but more heroic—to be a Green Bone back in his grandfather’s days, when the enemy had been a cruel foreign power.
Janloon was a study in contradictions that could befuddle even someone born there: a bubbling, dirty stew and a modern, glamorous metropolis at the same time, a place overly conscious of trying to be a world-class city, despite being at its core a system of clan fiefdoms.
What would happen if she ignored him and went up to one of those boulders and placed the flat of her hand on the raw jade? She wondered if it would knock her unconscious or stop her heart. Would she, for an instant, experience a moment of unsurpassed power and clarity that would make her feel like a moth burning in ecstasy in a flame?
All human progress and virtuous striving is likewise an attempt to achieve familial forgiveness and a return to the spiritually and physically divine state, which lies latent but distantly remembered.
Give me your blessing, or condemn me, but don’t wash your hands of me.
Anden was not surprised or particularly troubled by this view. He already knew his family was cursed. In general, however, people were uncomfortable around misfortune and reluctant to admit to their own.
She’d been a fool, but sadly, even fools were entitled to their pride.
She wondered how deeply the penitents could Perceive her. Was it possible, with enough jade power, to go beyond sensing a person’s presence and the subtleties of their physical state, to see into their thoughts, into their very souls?
Was it possible, Lan wondered, to be both a strong leader and a compassionate person, or were those two things opposing forces, pushing each other away?
Fundamental driving question of Lan's existence
she wondered if this mixture of sadness, strange elation, and calm acceptance was what one would feel in the moments of free fall after jumping off a high bridge. One could not change fate after such a decision, only own the choice and anticipate its inevitable outcome.
Deitism, indeed all religion, made a complicated story out of truths that were simple but hard for people to accept.
If there is an afterlife, when you see me again, you tell me if I kept the oaths I made to you.”
It was peace, not war, that divided us into clans, turned us into rivals for territory and business and jade.
It was the way of all things, to live and die at the whim of more powerful creatures,
All he knew now was that remorse had a natural limit. After a certain amount of time, it finished eating a person hollow and had to alchemize into anger that could be turned outward lest it consume its host entirely.
There’s a way to discipline a man so he hates you forever, and another way to do it so he loves you all the more for it.
Hilo's guiding principle
“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.”
Of course, his family still considered him an unspeakable embarrassment, but being filthy rich was the best sort of revenge.
Hilo dismissed all that: “Fatalistic bullshit. No one’s destined to become their parents.”
“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.”
He insists he loves me too much to let me get involved in the war in any way… and I love him too much to obey.”
Two strong-minded women in a man’s world, if they do not quickly become allies, are destined to be incurable rivals.
Possibilities that lay in the past were illusions, closed doors, as meaningless as unfulfilled intentions.
