sam j > sam's Quotes

“I have become something wonderful, she thought. I have become something terrible. Was she now a goddess or a monster? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“Jiang was wrong. She was not dabbling in forces she could not control, for the gods were not dangerous. The gods had no power at all, except what she gave them. The gods could affect the universe only through humans like her. Her destiny had not been written in the stars, or in the registers of the Pantheon. She had made her choices fully and autonomously. And though she called upon the gods to aid her in battle, they were her tools from beginning to end. She was no victim of destiny. She was the last Speerly, commander of the Cike, and a shaman who called the gods to do her bidding. And she would call the gods to do such terrible things.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“The cruelty could not register for her. Bloodlust, she understood. Bloodlust, she was guilty of. She had lost herself in battle, too; she had gone further than she should have, she had hurt others when she should have stopped. But this—viciousness on this scale, wanton slaughter of this magnitude, against innocents who hadn’t even lifted a finger in self-defense, this she could not imagine doing. They surrendered, she wanted to scream at her disappeared enemy. They dropped their weapons. They posed no threat to you. Why did you have to do this? A rational explanation eluded her. Because the answer could not be rational. It was not founded in military strategy. It was not because of a shortage of food rations, or because of the risk of insurgency or backlash. It was, simply, what happened when one race decided that the other was insignificant. The Federation had massacred Golyn Niis for the simple reason that they did not think of the Nikara as human. And if your opponent was not human, if your opponent was a cockroach, what did it matter how many of them you killed? What was the difference between crushing an ant and setting an anthill on fire? Why shouldn’t you pull wings off insects for your own enjoyment? The bug might feel pain, but what did that matter to you? If you were the victim, what could you say to make your tormentor recognize you as human? How did you get your enemy to recognize you at all? And why should an oppressor care?”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“I am the force of creation, I am
the end and the beginning. The world is a painting and I hold the brush. I
am a god.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“Call off your men, or I will summon into existence things that should not be in this world”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“She’s the only divine thing he’s ever believed in. The only creature in this vast, cruel land who could kill him. And sometimes, in his loveliest dreams, he imagines she does.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Drowning Faith

“This was not a world of men. It was a world of gods, a time of great powers. It was the era of divinity walking in man, of wind and water and fire. And in warfare, she who held the power asymmetry was the inevitable victor.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic

“She had a weapon now. She wasn't defenseless against him. She'd never been defenseless. She had just never thought to look.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic

“She saw it in a flash of utter clarity. She knew what she had to do. The only path, the only way forward. And what a familiar path it was. It was so obvious now. The world was a dream of the gods, and the gods dreamed in sequences, in symmetry, in patterns. History repeated itself, and she was only the latest iteration of the same scene in a tapestry that had been spun long before her birth.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“You don’t know who you’re dealing with.” She leaned down close until her lips brushed his skin, until her breath scorched the side of his face. “I’m not Sinegardian elite. I’m that savage mud-skinned Speerly bitch that wiped a country off the map. And sometimes when I get a little too angry, I snap.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“Oh, I will be cruel to you, Marya Morevna. It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be. But you understand, don’t you? You are clever enough. I am a demanding creature. I am selfish and cruel and extremely unreasonable. But I am your servant. When you starve I will feed you; when you are sick I will tend you. I crawl at your feet; for before your love, your kisses, I am debased. For you alone I will be weak.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“But the thought arrived inside her like a train: Marya Morevna, all in black, here and now, was a point at which all the women she had been met—the Yaichkan and the Leningrader and the chyerti maiden; the girl who saw the birds, and the girl who never did—the woman she was and the woman she might have been and the woman she would always be, forever intersecting and colliding, a thousand birds falling from a thousand oaks, over and over.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Koschei, Koschei,” she whispered. “What would I have been if I had never seen the birds? I am no one; I am nothing. I am a blank paper on which you and your magic wrote a girl. Just the kind of girl you wanted, all hungry and hurt and needing. A machine for loving you. Nothing in me was not made by you.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“We forget, in a world completely transformed by man, that what we’re looking at is not necessarily the environment wildlife prefer, but the depleted remnant that wildlife is having to cope with: what it has is not necessarily what it wants.”
― Isabella Tree, Wilding

“Deep, rich orange and speckled with black, every now and again a flick of their wings flashed an underside of green and mother-of-pearl - the silver wash that gives the fritillaries their name. The female flies straight and level, the slow semaphore of her wing-beats and the scent from the tip of her abdomen exuding allure. The male swoops in tight loops under and up and in front of her, stalling so she can pass beneath him through a shower of intoxicating scent-scales shed from his forewings.”
― Isabella Tree, Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm

“He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I have decided to sleep under the stars... Tonight heaven is my roof, and the hedges my walls... The field folds me in soft wings.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field

“And nothing in nature is wasted. The bodies of the dead meadow ants will go to nourish the soil of the meadow. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Flesh to flesh.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field

“She terrifies him, and he loves her so much it hurts.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Drowning Faith

“Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“It's not the house that is haunted. It's me.
And I want to be; I have to be. Because if I give them up - if I stop looking back - everything that ever happened to us will cease to exist.”
― Edward Parnell, Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country

“I am vulnerable to superstitions and fairy tales, the pockets of weirdness smattering the land.”
― Daisy Johnson, Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

“traditional tales are neither so simplistic nor so predictable. They give generous space to the subaltern voice: to the powerless, to the poor, to girls and wives, even to animals, all those creatures who need to find ways not only to survive in this difficult world, but to live well in it, despite the dark forces ranged against them. These stories compel, seizing our attention with their strangeness while at the same time speaking clearly to shared themes of human existence. They explore huge questions: of love and loss, and of the conditions under which we do our everyday work and how we might thrive in it. They patrol the shadowy borderlands between life and death and they tease out our hopes and fears for our children. They demand we consider issues such as migration, asking who belongs here, who can make a home here, who can find the strength to begin all over again in a strange new land – and who might have been here for much longer than you think. Folktales pick fights about disability and aging, about women and men, and, crucially, they hold out to us the environments in which we live – our much-loved British countryside – and show how it might slip through our fingers.”
― Daisy Johnson, Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

“Inherent in retelling is – at first – destruction. Breaking down from the inside out. Suggested is respect but what is really there is vengeance, violence, retribution, the allure of denigration.”
― Daisy Johnson, Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

“I am plant as well as animal. My blood transports oxygen; my chlorophyll produces it. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus surge along tissue, torso, culm to my blades. Blood blends magnesium as well as iron. I am grass made flesh. Grassling.”
― Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, The Grassling

“The membrane between worlds was thinner out here than the inland-dwelling peoples could ever realise, so they expected no help.”
― Dan Coxon, This Dreaming Isle

“They worshiped the golden idols and they feared no invasion. For who would disinherit the devil?”
― Amy Jeffs, Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain

“Myths hold the echo of collective emotion, whatever they reveal of events.”
― Amy Jeffs, Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain

“Learning, debating and growing, we will tell each other stories into the night. Our lives will encircle the sun: setting and rising, setting and rising.”
― Amy Jeffs, Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain