The Fate of the Tearling (The Queen of the Tearling, #3)

by Erika Johansen

Believe, or not; your neighbor’s belief will wound you just as surely as your own.

“You idealists are all the same,” the Red Queen spat. “You assume that because you wish no harm, your decisions are always harmless.

I get a suite of beautiful rooms and three cooked meals a day. I am well guarded from predators, I work my own hours, and I choose my own clientele.”

“My child will be cared for and then schooled by three women Madame Arneau keeps for no other reason. And when my child gets older, there will be no shame in knowing that Mother was a whore. What do you think of that?” “I think it’s criminal.” “You would, Javel. I might once have thought so too. But this city is better to women than New London has ever aspired to be.

The mistake of utopia is to assume that all will be perfect. Perfection may be the definition, but we are human, and even into utopia we bring our own pain, error, jealousy, grief.

to plan a new society without taking human nature into account is to doom that society to failure.

History always mattered. There was a pattern here, and sooner or later, it would begin to repeat itself.

the idea that they saw her so differently from the way she saw herself stunned her into silence.

though Hall had never met any Cadarese, he knew they were not to be trusted.

Sometimes I think: if they want to walk around armed and build fences and let a church tell them what to do, let them wallow in it. They can build their own town of closed thinking, and live there, and find out later what a shitty place it really is. It’s not my problem.”

Whether the topic was physics or history, it made no difference; trying to do the right thing so often ended in wrong. Kelsea shrank from the idea, for she felt it as the first step on the road to paralysis, an inability to make any decision at all for fear of unforeseen consequence.

“Empathy. Carlin always said it was the great value of fiction, to put us inside the minds of strangers.

Perhaps it was simply her long life of reading books, where plot was carefully scripted and every action taken was supposed to mean something.

the word sin never failed to irritate her, and she was sickened by the idea that he had not found Katie worth saving until she was carrying a child.

But even if safety were somehow achievable by force, Lear, ask yourself this: how important is safety? Is it worth steadily undermining every principle on which a free nation was founded? What sort of nation will you have then?”