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“Why have we not an immortal soul? I would give gladly all the hundreds of years that I have to live, to be a human being only for one day.”
But Harrowhark—Harrow, who was two hundred dead children; Harrow, who loved something that had not been alive for ten thousand years—Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.
“Soul magic is the great leveller.
But you found chilly comfort in being within a range of normality, rather than on the wrong side of a binary.
a half-cocked version of something is significantly worse than not being cocked at all.”
“Nobody has the right to blame you. Nobody can judge. What has happened, has happened, and there’s no putting it back in the box. They wouldn’t understand. They don’t have to. I officially relieve you from living in fear. Nobody has to know.”
once you turn your back on something, you have no more right to act as though you own it.”
“Poetry is one of the most beautiful shadows a civilisation can cast across time,”
“The water is risen. So is the sun. We will endure.”
I think you are one of the only Lyctors who can really and truly understand apocalypse … It is not a death of fire. It’s not showy. You and I would almost prefer the end, if it came as a supernova. It is the inexorable setting of the sun, without another hope of morning.”
What a fool. What a destructive, romantic, ridiculous act. It was always a certain kind of ass who approached love like that—a certain kind of very good, talented ass, who had been overly used to their hands on the reins and never could cope when they were taken off—nor had the personality to put them back on again.
This was your shell, but it was all filled up with me. God, the double entendres were hard to resist.
THE ONLY THING OUR CIVILISATION CAN EVER LEARN FROM YOURS IS THAT WHEN OUR BACKS ARE TO THE WALL AND OUR TOWERS ARE FALLING ALL AROUND US AND WE ARE WATCHING OURSELVES BURN WE RARELY BECOME HEROES.
It takes a great deal of ego to be a psychopomp.
One idiot with a sword and an asymmetrical smile had proved to be Harrow’s end: her apocalypse swifter than the death of the Emperor and the sun with him.
There is no such thing as forgiveness, Mercy. There’s only bloody truth, and blessed ignorance.”
