The Burning White (Lightbringer #5)

by Brent Weeks

just a matter of will, Adrasteia,” Gavin said. “You grab the one thread your fingers can reach, and you pull until the whole cloth unravels.” “It’s not that simple. They’re—” “And if you can’t save your father, then you poison the well. You rip them out by the root. And every time your heart inclines to mercy, if you love your father, you remember whatever tiny shred of devotion you hold toward that poor man, and you make sure they don’t steal and murder any other little girl’s father ever again.

But there were things only he could do, and that he could only do if he stayed. Things only Kip cared enough to do. Things only he could get away with. That wasn’t even counting the things he should do that he could do better than anyone else.

He wasn’t poor Kip Delauria of Rekton anymore. He was Kip Guile of Blood Forest. And if the fights felt the same—the isolation, the self-doubt—maybe all those earlier fights had been readying him for this one.

If an institution requires the monstrous in order to operate—requires, not commits incidentally, requires in an essential way—is it not therefore itself fundamentally monstrous?

If an institution presents itself as uniquely moral but is secretly monstrous, isn’t that proof that its very ideas are corrupt and corrupting, rather than that only some few of its practitioners are corrupt?

what’s the pro’lem? They know the deal: Light duty mos’ times, respect e’erwhere, good pay, and when they take the last lonely boat, their family gets a sack o’ gold. They get all that, and in return they gotta obey and they get a short life. Sailors get nothing ’ceptin’ the obedience and short life.” Putting it like that, it didn’t sound like such a bad deal. Better than working a farm until the arthritis made every move hell, and then working it another ten years, prayin’ you could hold on to life until your sons and daughters could fend for themselves. Didn’t sound like a bad deal, when you were fifteen years old and forty sounded ancient and they asked you to scrawl your damn idiot signature on the vow.

But it didn’t seem like such a good deal when you were a father who still felt young and you held an infant in your arms who’d already never know her drafter mother, and the Prism who’d killed her first now asked

you to hand over the child to some uncaring luxiat so he could slice...

Gifted? I’m skilled. People call others ‘gifted’ when they don’t want to believe they’re worse at something because they’re not willing to put in the work excellence requires. Regardless—I mean, if I have your permission to finish my thought?

Though without mastery of all he should have mastered to deserve such obedience, he was their master.

I only wish I could say it aloud. I dream of the day when I have so much power that my sons may say aloud what they actually think.

Dim people ride a mule to their conclusions, bright ones a racehorse—but not always in the right direction.

suppose, then,” he says, “if you are incapable of being a man unmirrored, then perhaps what you ought to have set as your first objective in this visit was figuring out exactly what I do like.” “‘A man unmirrored’?” I ask. “An old colloquialism. A man who doesn’t practice pulling faces in front of a mirror. A man who is himself. A forthright man,” he says.

I see it now. Frustrate me with delays and promises while he knows I need to be elsewhere, and raise the stakes of my own time investment. The longer I’ve spent here, the harder and harder for me to walk away empty-handed. I’ll be more willing to compromise—without him even having to broach the subject.

But if someone told me a story that drove up the price and addressed all my concerns about a forgery so conveniently, I’d keep both hands on my coin purse.

With one meeting after another, all day long, each demanding total focus? He’d barely thought about her at all. But that didn’t feel like the right thing to say at the moment, so he slid his hand up her cheek into her newly loosed blonde hair and pulled her head back to kiss her as he joined her in the little closet.

She got it then, though he was so intelligent that he forgot that others weren’t as quick as he was.

Andy’ after a sudden growth spurt out of my youthful rotundity had left me clumsy

Dragon, my ass. It’s risible. It doesn’t look anything like a dragon. It doesn’t look like a monkey-lizard or scorpion-dog or anything else ‘formidable.’ The ridiculous little fatty looks like a turtle-bear.

Mirrors break us into pieces because that’s how the eye focuses: one detail at a time, a prism splitting our whole experience, but the heart can be a second prism brought to the first, bringing that which is split back into a whole.

When he didn’t understand the answer about why a particular fiber was good for a task, he asked again, and then a follow-up; he dared to do so now because he wasn’t afraid of looking stupid. Even if he would never understand the things these men understood easily, it was no essential threat to him. He did other things well. He didn’t have to be good at everything.

these! If we lose them all, we will no longer be able to make Prisms, nor indeed, fight the elohim when they return.

always feared men where you should have feared God.