The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1)

by R.F. Kuang

“We aren’t here to be sophisticated. We’re here to fuck people up.”

Altan is the last scion of a dead race. If the Speerlies prayed to their god, it clearly didn’t save them.”

But the misery she felt now was a good misery. This misery she reveled in, because she had chosen it for herself.

“I thought the Red Junk Opera was dead,” said Rin. “Mostly dead. You can’t kill a movement. Somewhere out there, some religious lunatics are intent on killing the Empress.” Kitay

“The Nikara thought the gods had abandoned them, for how else could the barbarians from the east have wreaked such destruction upon them?”

“But how does the existence or nonexistence of the gods affect me? Why does it matter how the universe came to be?” “Because you’re part of it. Because you exist. And unless you want to only ever be a tiny modicum of existence that doesn’t understand its relation to the grander web of things, you will explore.”

Rin half hoped he would forget this stipulation, the same way he occasionally forgot what year it was, or what his name was.

“What’s the difference between a god within and a god outside? What is the difference between the universe contained in your mind and the universe external?”

The thing about watching someone get high was that if you weren’t getting high yourself, things got very boring very soon.

“Without the right mental preparation, psychedelics won’t do anything for you,” he said. “You’ll just become terribly annoying for a while.”

“We’re at war! We might die anyway. So maybe calling the gods gives us a fighting chance. What’s the worst that could happen?” “You’re so young,” he said softly. “You have no idea.”

Children ceased to be children when you put a sword in their hands. When you taught them to fight a war, then you armed them and put them on the front lines, they were not children anymore. They were soldiers.

My only god is science. Combine six parts sulfur, six parts saltpeter, and one part birthwort herb, and you’ve got fire powder. Formulaic. Dependable. Doesn’t change.

“Do you know how badly it hurt? They were in me, they were in me for hours and they wouldn’t stop. I blacked out over and over but every time I awoke they were still going, a different man would be on top of me, or maybe the same man . . . they were all the same after a while. It was a nightmare, and I couldn’t wake up.”