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“I didn’t think this was the time for dirty talk, but I can roll with it,” she said. “Choke me, Daddy.”
My body is ready.”
He was a mystery too boring to solve.
Also, you were wearing a bedsheet. You
You looked like an imbecile.
but then you knew nothing more, except that you hadn’t thrown up on God, which had to count as consolation.
committed a little light child massacre.
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.
I’ve seen your face before, and I know it looks like both of your parents were right-angled triangles. We must work with what we’ve got, as the flesh magician said to the leper.”
Your only settings were power-vomit and murder.”
“You look like a huge peppermint.
Harrowhark had always thought Matthias Nonius, legendary cavalier of her House, sounded like an absolute horse’s ass.
This pair of eyes were a slumbrous, sand-tinted hazel with grey-madder clouds within them, like a red hurricane moving over a gaseous mantle, like a storm-ridden planet of red dust.
The scythe of pain that swept over the back of your scalp nearly made you sick again, and you would have been if you had not of late become the Saint of Emesis.
“You look like a bat stuck in a birthday cake and you need at least two haircuts, but you are—you will be—you were—God’s breath, and God’s bones.”
Pride was swiftly becoming a planet you had travelled to once but no longer remembered in detail.
The Emperor mumbled something that, you would swear on the rock before the Tomb, sounded like For fuck’s sake.
were aware of yourself as an ova cluster of two hundred pinpricks of light. You were a sigil: you were an intermingled fire.
you were a hunger without a stomach.
She hated it when people dressed constructs; it smacked of whimsy, like making one’s hammer wear a hat.
the cold death to anyone who looks at me in pity; the heat death to anyone who looks at me in amusement; the quick death to anyone who looks at me in fear.
you for that, Ortus the Ninth?” “Pray only that my bones be one day interred in the Anastasian monument, where even the ghost of the light does not go,” said Ortus, in front of everybody, like an absolute shit. Even in the shadow the heat slapped down on him, and beneath his veil some idiot had painted him with the Skull of the Anchorite Dying, that idiot probably being Ortus.
went to kiss her hello, and she said: ‘Lord, I can’t kiss you back. My lipstick’s perfect and I refuse to smear it.’”
“It wasn’t, though. She had it on her teeth.”
Augustine reached over and squeezed the shoulder of the man who became God and the God who became man and yet still invoked himself, apparently;
THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME SO I DID THE IMPLANTATION MYSELF YOU SELF-SERVING ZOMBIE AND YOU STILL SENT HIM AFTER ME AND I WOULD HAVE HAD HIM IF I HADN’T BEEN COMPROMISED AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE SAW ME AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME AND FOR THAT I’LL MAKE YOU BOTH SUFFER UNTIL YOU NO LONGER UNDERSTAND THE MEANING OF THAT GODDAMNED WORD
you bursting organ, you wretched, self-regarding hypochondriac and half-fermented corpse with the nails still on,
“diet Lyctor.”
they would see it as a screaming beacon of thanergy—a burning gyre of death—letters writ large in space, HERE IS THE GRAVEYARD AND WE ARE THE GRAVES.
You were an insect standing before a forest fire. You were a cell beholding a heart.
“if Ianthe’s opinion isn’t worth a fart in a hurricane, try to imagine how much less I value yours.”
A man-shaped eclipse.
unsettling and part feral, giving the impression that she was now a bag with ten snakes inside
You egg!”
“Oh, I hate you! I’ve always hated you, you dreary, repetitive leg,”
He stared as though the Seventh cavalier had revealed himself to be the Sleeper, done awful and inadvisable acts with Ortus’s mother, and compared Matthias Nonius to two shits.
“Do not mistake the thaw for the spring. Our bud is not yet certain,”
HIM I’LL KILL QUICK BECAUSE SHE ASKED ME TO AND BECAUSE THAT MUCH HE HONESTLY DESERVES BUT YOU TWO MUMMIFIED WIZARD SHITS I WILL BURN AND BURN AND BURN AND BURN UNTIL THERE IS NO TRACE OF YOU LEFT IN THE SHADOW OF MY LONG-LOST NATAL SUN
“God is a dickhead,”
“I’d strangle you with your own visceral fat before you raised one shitty skeleton.”
“You cut up an onion, burn it at the bottom of the pot, put in a few vegetables, and then some meat. It won’t taste like anything, so put in a few teaspoons of salt, and then it’ll taste like a few teaspoons of salt.”
Let me give you a list of my favourite meals so that you can get them interestingly wrong.”
“And somewhere out there, may all the blood of your blood suffer even a fraction of what I have suffered.”
You absolute idiot baby, you were mystified.
WILL REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU KISSED ME—YOU APOLOGISED—YOU SAID, I AM SORRY, DESTROY ME AS I AM, BUT I WANT TO KISS YOU BEFORE I AM KILLED, AND I SAID TO YOU WHY, AND YOU SAID, BECAUSE I HAVE ONLY ONCE MET SOMEONE SO UTTERLY WILLING TO BURN FOR WHAT THEY BELIEVED IN, AND I LOVED HIM ON SIGHT, AND THE FIRST TIME I DIED I ASKED OF HIM WHAT I NOW ASK OF YOU I KISSED YOU AND LATER I WOULD KISS HIM TOO BEFORE I UNDERSTOOD WHAT YOU WERE, AND ALL THREE OF US LIVED TO REGRET IT—BUT WHEN I AM IN HEAVEN I WILL REMEMBER YOUR MOUTH, AND WHEN YOU ROAST DOWN IN HELL I THINK YOU WILL REMEMBER MINE
“I haven’t invited you to an orgy, Harrow.”
“Not this time, my child. I’m sick of being associated with a half-snapped stick of liquorice, dressed in a tent
