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

by Samantha Shannon

“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.”

I will not let humankind walk to its extinction. We may be small, and we may be young, but we will shake the world for our beliefs.”

That was when her heart had grown harder, like a ship collecting barnacles.

“Oh, there are things that even Seyton misses,” Crest remarked, a rare smile on her face. “How thin his hair is getting, for instance. Even a hawk cannot see the back of its own head.”

The sun was an open wound, the sky a thousand variations on pink.

“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.”

“Alas that children cannot be called into being merely by our wishing hard enough for them.

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

“My will was not always what it is now. Once I was as molten glass, yet to be spun into shape. I sense I have taken a shape she mislikes.”

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

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

the sea is not always pure. It is not any one thing. There is darkness in it, and danger, and cruelty. It can raze great cities with its rage. Its depths are unknowable; they do not see the touch of the sun.

“They raise us to be soft as silk, distract us with luxury and wealth beyond measure, so we never rock the boat that carries us. They expect us to be so bored by our power that we let them do the ruling in our stead. Behind every throne is a masked servant who seeks only to make a puppet of the one who sits on it.

“Some truths,” he said, “are safest buried. Some castles best kept in the sky. There’s promise in tales that are yet to be spoken. In the shadow realm, known only to the few.”