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The biggest one was probably don’t trust anyone who makes you feel good without knowing why they want you to feel that way.
She slipped out the door before Mahit could ask her the questions on the tip of her tongue: Would you be as fascinated with these aliens as you have been with me? Considering we are all barbarians, even if I am as human as you are?
Fuck but it was a continuous heartbreak that Mahit Dzmare had been born a barbarian— But would she have liked her as well, if she hadn’t been?
Snapped, and regretted snapping, and at the same time felt that brutal and brittle glee she always had at getting right down to the meat of some argument, some problem, and sinking in her teeth, ready to tear.
She’d meant, When you understand that when the Empire commands, I can’t say no. She’d meant, When you understand that there’s no room for me to mean yes, even if I want to.
He was wrong about that, Mahit thought, exile happened in the heart and the mind long before it happened to the body that moved in space, across borders—
That’s the way we fall—being wanted.
there was no such thing as safety and no such thing as going home.
A little longer yet, for wondering why Eleven Laurel sent her here, and for the yaotlek to come to the inevitable conclusion that to avoid an endless war they must begin with an unanswerable atrocity:
Maybe they thought humans might be a kind of person, too.
The idea that there might be something other than Teixcalaan, when one said the word for world.)
She darted backward, and Three Seagrass—amazed and horrified and utterly delighted, all at once, which was pretty much how Mahit doing anything made her feel, really—stepped in front of her.
Somewhere down on Peloa-2 a man who believed that waste was the worst thing that could happen to a society was letting himself be devoured.
Language is not so transparent, but we are sometimes known, even so. If we are lucky.
