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Fuck, she thought, and heard at the same moment Yskandr say <Fuck.> The doubling wasn’t reassuring.
Lmao
She had no idea what to do with a corpse. She had never burnt anyone herself; she was too young. Her parents were both still living. And besides, what you did was you called the funeral manager and they handled it, preferably while someone you loved held your hand and cried with you over the mutual loss.
we are useless in the face of loss despite its omnipresence
The name the man had chosen, it turned out, was Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle, a revelation that produced in both Mahit and Three Seagrass a kind of stunned silence. “No one would actually name a child that,” Three Seagrass complained after a moment. “He has no taste.
amazing
looking at him gave Mahit the impression of being in the presence of some other culture’s impeccably observed standard of masculine beauty. She felt a little peculiar about her lack of response. He was like an art object.
REALLLL
Death was private except for where it was the beginning of the most intimate contact two people could have.
THE problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.
so real
She had a very Teixcalaanli moment of being insulted at his lack of effort in allusion, and then a very personal moment of satisfaction at having successfully played the dull barbarian, trying so hard to emulate a citizen’s education and only achieving an awkward and pitiable imitation.
The room was as crowded with patricians as it was with lights, clustering and unclustering in conversational knots, one enormous Teixcalaanli organism that shifted only in configuration.
Mahit bowed over her fingertips and was an extremely proper barbarian—respectful, occasionally clever, mostly quiet in the midst of the sharp chatter of ambitious young people. She could follow about half of the allusions and quotations that slipped in and out of their speech. It made her jealous in a way she recognized as childish: the dumb longing of a noncitizen to be acknowledged as a citizen. Teixcalaan was made to instill the longing, not to satisfactorily resolve it, she knew that. And yet it wormed into her every time she bit her tongue, every time she didn’t know a word or the precise
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"the dumb longing of a noncitizen to be acknowledged as a citizen" oof
Maybe she’d get to come up with her own opinion. That felt frightening, and a little exhilarating, as a possibility.
being alone in Teixcalaan was like drowning in clear air.
“Just once,” Mahit said, with a sort of desperate and useless frustration, “I’d like you to imagine I might do something because it’s what a person does.”
“You look terrible, Petal,” said Three Seagrass. “There is a dead man on your rug, Reed; how I look is not important.”
Thought again of the City as an algorithm: considered, for the first time clearly, that no algorithm was innocent of its designers. It couldn’t be. There was an originating purpose for an algorithm, however distant in its past—a reason some human person made it, even if it had evolved and folded in on itself and transformed.
oof ya
Patriotism seemed to derive quite easily from extremity.
I will always be measuring the distance between myself and a person who remained in the heart of the world; between the person I would have been had I stayed and the person I have become
If she’d been at home on Lsel, she suspected that the integration therapists would have an absolute field day with her and Yskandr. They’d get a scientific paper out of it.
too real lmao
an exhausted runner, leaning out of breath, trying to adjust to the deep ache in its lungs, small funerals bloomed like fungi after rain:
“Ibis,” maybe. Or “egret.” There were a lot of kinds of birds in Teixcalaanli, and one word for “bird” in Stationer. There’d been more, once. They didn’t need more than that now. The one stood for the concept.
