The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

You cannot wait for history to turn in your favor. But at least there is revenge, which is like justice the way saltwater is like fresh.

Two Falcresti lives taken in vengeance for a hundred thousand Oriati dead. And more later. And more. And more forever. Who ever heard of an avenger satisfied? Even one?

People bent. You hit them hard enough and they just bent.

he did not yet know what all captains and all admirals had to learn, that you could not protect your best. They would find their own danger.

“Without force or finance to hold the empire together, it begins to fragment.

A soul is simply the text of a person’s inner law, and a mind is the act of reading that law into the world.

But to call attention to the ordinary would be to make it extraordinary, and to ruin it. So Tau was silent, and witnessed, glad that the ordinary was worth witnessing.

It hurt to look at her. Because you saw how much happier she might have been, in another world.

What a terrible wonder to know your own beauty, without shame, and to set it to use, for yourself and for your duty.

You were in deepest despair yesterday. You thought that all was lost, that you were going to die. You struck the bottom of your fall. And suddenly you were so high, so free, and everything was all right. But really what’s happened is that you struck bottom so hard you bounced. Now you’re sinking again.

It was a noble thing to constantly ask yourself to be better. But it could also be arrogant, self-involved, oblivious. As if everything that mattered was ultimately about Oriati people and their conduct. As if they were so powerful, so central to the world, that only they could be blamed for their own defeat.

He’ll hate it, he’ll tell me he hates it, he’ll keep himself up at night and wrestle with his conscience. But it won’t stop him. He’s the softest kind of evil, the kind that thinks through all the hurt it does, and does it anyway.”

by holding to basic principles of kindness, charity, and honesty, they prevented themselves from succumbing to the pressures of circumstance. Circumstance could be manipulated. Principle could not. Neither could absolute, immovable, irreconcilable defiance.