The Priory of the Orange Tree (The Roots of Chaos, #1)

by Samantha Shannon

“All the world is a cage in a young girl’s eyes.”

“Reading,” Ead said lightly. “A dangerous pastime.” Truyde looked up at her, sharp-eyed. “You mock me.” “By no means. There is great power in stories.” “All stories grow from a seed of truth,” Truyde said. “They are knowledge after figuration.”

Art is not one great act of creation, but many small ones. When you read one of my poems, you fail to see the weeks of careful work it took me to build it—the thinking, the scratched-out words, the pages I burned in disgust. All you see, in the end, is what I want you to see. Such is politics.”

Susa had risked everything for a dream that was not hers. That sort of friendship was something not found more than once in a lifetime. Some might not find it at all.

“In darkness, we are naked. Our truest selves. Night is when fear comes to us at its fullest, when we have no way to fight it,” Ead continued. “It will do everything it can to seep inside you. Sometimes it may succeed—but never think that you are the night.”

“Only ignorant men do not ask questions.”

No woman should be made to fear that she was not enough.

Fire, the element of the winged demons, required constant feeding. It was the element of war and greed and vengeance—always hungry, never satisfied. Water needed no coal or tinder to exist. It could shape itself to any space. It nourished flesh and earth and asked for nothing in return.

All of it connected. All of it stemming to one truth: fire from beneath, light from above. A universe built on this duality.

There is courage, I think, in open-mindedness, and thinking for oneself.

“Piety can turn the power-hungry into monsters,” Ead said. “They can twist any teaching to justify their actions.”

“Margret,” he said, “you are my child. I forgave you all your sins on the first day of your life.”

“Just because something has always been done does not mean that it ought to be done.”

“That one day, you will forgive yourself. You are in the spring of your life, child, and have much to learn about this world. Do not deny yourself the privilege of living.”

“Would the world be any better if we were all the same?”

“There is great risk for us all, I know. But what ruler made history by avoiding it?”