149 Quotes

“Baru was Farrier's monument, his exemplar, his masterpiece. A degenerate child molded into a brilliant Imperial agent. A tribadist who, even when dispatched into rebel woods to consort with warrior duchesses, enforced her own chastity until the night before the end. A traitor who would voluntarily return to Falcrest, to her own repression and to Farrier's control. Because she believed she was a savant, a hard woman, someone who sacrificed what she must in order to do what was necessary. Someone who *had* to be alone.
Behold the chains he placed on you.
His law lived in Baru. Everything she accomplished was tainted by it.
If I show you favor, woman, then you will die.
And through that death I will progress.
She wore an invisible mask: the laughing face of Cairdine Farrier, carved into the skull of her soul.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“I saw the expectation in her face, saw it light up with joy when she recognized me, watched her eyes scan my face as I approached, saw them seek, inquire, then look uncertain and hurt, and saw the light go out of her face.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“8. Conditions of Dialogue

The functional is what is practical. The only practical thing is the resolution of our fundamental problem: the realization of ourselves (our uncoupling from the system of isolation). This is useful and utilitarian. Nothing else. All the rest represents only trivial derivations of the practical, and its mystification.”
― Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader

“We know how the Universe ends—' said the guide, 'and Earth has nothing to do with it, except it gets wiped out, too.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five