Light Bringer (Red Rising Saga, #6)

by Pierce Brown

Inside me there is a coward who fears discomfort. That coward will offer solace in the form of excuses. But it is the coward who grooms a man for his defeats. The coward who makes him accept them because he is accustomed to finding a good reason to quit. The coward inside can only be killed one way.

You’re acting like you share a secret language all of a sudden.” “Isn’t that always the case with those who’ve read the same books?”

We achieve perfection first by acknowledging our failures. We increase understanding first by recognizing our ignorance.

“If you wish to be repaired, you must first be broken,”

How can we promise freedom and then be the arbiter of a people’s choices? That is not freedom. That is social engineering. That is the long road to tyranny.”

“I think…if love is anything, it is truth. If life is anything, it is struggle.

He is my favorite smell, my favorite sound, my favorite sight. He will never know how much I love him because he does not remember the day Darrow and I conceived him, or the months I carried him inside me, or the minute he came into the world, the moment he said his first word or took his first step, or made me laugh for the first time. I remember all those things, and all the things about them. Where the sun lay in the sky, how his father’s eyes sparkled, what I feared in those moments, what I hoped for his life to be. That season of life is a haze to him, but when I die and reflect on my life, I know I will still believe that season was the meaning of mine.

“You don’t have me by the throat. You have me by the balls. You can wrench and twist and it will cause me terrible agony. But in the end, they are just balls, and I am a woman, so I will go on, enduring without my balls and I will pester you with death by a billion cuts. Except it won’t be me. I am not a captain who goes down with his ship. I am a Sovereign, who will delegate to people more suited for tunnels and darkness and the horrors that happen there.”