A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1)

by Arkady Martine

This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own.

There is, Tarats believes, a kind of inevitability to empire unchecked.

Patriotism seemed to derive quite easily from extremity.

(She was getting used to the combination: that doubling, the strangeness of being grateful for something she should never have had to experience in the first place. Teixcalaan was full of it.)

ideological unity was flexible. Mutable, under stress.

It wouldn’t be different here in the heart of the Empire, once they started shooting. It wouldn’t be different at all. That was the problem. Empire was empire—the part that seduced and the part that clamped down, jaws like a vise, and shook a planet until its neck was broken and it died.

(The politics would come after the facts; would devolve from the nature of the facts, as politics tended to do.)