The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1)
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Started reading May 9, 2025
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But the misery she felt now was a good misery. This misery she reveled in, because she had chosen it for herself.
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“I have taught her class the crushing sensation of disappointment and the even more important lesson that they do not matter as much as they think they do.”
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Youth, Rin thought, was an amplification of beauty. It was a filter; it could mask what one was lacking, enhance even the most average features. But beauty without youth was dangerous. The Empress’s beauty did not require the soft fullness of young lips, the rosy red of young cheeks, the tenderness of young skin. This beauty cut deep, like a sharpened crystal. This beauty was immortal.
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When man begins to think that he is responsible for writing the script of the world, he forgets the forces that dream up our reality.
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The world was simpler when all that existed was what you could perceive in front of you. Easier to forget the underlying forces that constructed the dream. Easier to believe that reality existed only on one plane.
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War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.”
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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.
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So she reverted to the most primitive of methods. She opened her mouth and screamed. She writhed on the floor. She beat at the soldiers with her fists and spat in their faces. She threatened to urinate in front of them. She shouted obscenities about their mothers. She shouted obscenities about their grandmothers. This continued for hours. Finally they acquiesced to her demand to see someone in charge.
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“We’re the final front,” said Altan. “If we fail, this country’s lost.” He clapped her on the shoulder. “Excited?”