Robin > Books: buddy-read‎ (381)

But when the foolish girl began slamming doors to indicate her extreme displeasure, he quietly informed her that since words spoken quickly could be misinterpreted, any requests to visit friends or go on outings in the foreseeable future would have to be submitted in writing, using proper spelling, full sentences that provided the necessary information he would need in order to make a decision, and, of course, good penmanship.”

If her boy’s pain went away, the one person he would need the most wouldn’t be there. The one the winged boy would need wouldn’t be there.
Daemon’s pain was the only key. Could she let her boy suffer now in order to spare him from greater pain later?
“Everything has a price,” she whispered as she retreated from the visions.

“The lesser of two evils, or the greater good. Get a good man to utter either of those phrases, and there is no one more eager to begin perpetrating evil.”

“A friend of mine once told me that when I got my memories back, I would have a choice. That no matter what I’d done, who I’d been … that I had a decision to make, moving forward. That the man I have been since I woke up in the forest, the one I want to be, doesn’t have to be erased by what I remember. Shouldn’t be erased.”

“I’m telling you that you should doubt—as I do my own beliefs. The day on which you decide not to question what you believe, is the day that you start making excuses for why you believe it.”

“We are the wealthiest species alive today. We want for nothing. Without us, there would be no tunnels, no ambi, no galactic map. But we achieved these things through subjugation. Violence. We destroyed entire worlds - entire species. It took a galactic war to stop us. We learned. We apologized. We changed. But we can't give back the things we took. We're still benefiting from them, and others are still suffering from actions centuries old. So, are we worthy? We, who give so much only because we took so much?”

“The enhanced call us misfits - people who don't fir their intended purpose. So maybe you're a misfit too. Doesn't mean you're not deserving. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be here.”

“At the core, you’ve got to get university certification for parenting, just as you do for, say, being a doctor or an engineer. No offence to you or your species, but going into the business of creating life without any sort of formal prep is . . .’ He laughed. ‘It’s baffling. But then, I’m biased.”

A – I was going to love Ian

and

B – His books would be

A – I was going to love Ian

and

B – His books would be better than Vlad’s.

“Clever, calculating, and cruel.” Ian’s voice dropped to an insinuating purr. “No wonder I married you.”

sometimes you have to kick the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

The Lady of the Ninth House stood before the drillshaft, wearing black and sneering. Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus had pretty much cornered the market on wearing black and sneering. It comprised 100 percent of her personality. Gideon marvelled that someone could live in the universe only seventeen years and yet wear black and sneer with such ancient self-assurance.

The whole place had the look of a picked-at body. But hot damn! What a beautiful corpse.

“My uncle can’t eat with your kind around,” he said. “Please leave.”
Gideon had a million questions. Like: Your kind? And: Why do you have such a baby uncle, one the colour of mayonnaise? And: Is “your kind” people who aren’t nephews and who have middle fingers?

“It’s bad enough that we’re stuck in this burnt-out old hovel without me scaring you. Isn’t it fantastically abandoned? Imagine all the ghosts of everyone who must have lived here … worked here … still waiting to be called, if we could figure out how. The Seventh doesn’t do well with ghosts, you know. We offend them. We’re worrisome. The old division between body and spirit. We deal too much with the body … crystallising it in time … trapping it unnaturally. The opposite of your House, don’t you think, Gideon the Ninth? You take empty things and build with them … We press down the hand of a clock, to try to stop it from ticking the last second.”

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in, or walling out.”
Robert Frost

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

"If memory is unreliable, if the past and the present can simply change without warning, then fact and truth will cease to exist. How do we live in a world like that?"

“Saint Augustine said it perfectly back in the fourth century: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

“I think, sometimes, when he's busy loving you, he forgets to hate himself.”

“We are what we choose to be, girl,' she said. 'Let others determine your worth, and you've already lost, because no one wants people worth more than themselves.”

“They twist things to suit themselves. They dress up and pretend. They wear Blood Jewels but don’t understand what it means to be Blood. They talk of honoring the Darkness, but it’s a lie. They honor nothing but their own ambitions. The Blood were created to be the caretakers of the Realms. That’s why we were given our power. That’s why we come from, yet are apart from, the people in every Territory. The perversion of what we are can’t go on. The day is coming when the debt will be called in, and the Blood will have to answer for what they’ve become.”

“So she can’t move furniture around a room, but she can destroy an entire continent.”
“She’ll never do that. It’s not in her temperament.”
“How can you be sure? How will you control her?”
They were back to that. He took his cape back and settled it over his shoulders.
“I’m not going to control her, Cassandra. She’s Witch. No male has the right to control Witch.”
Cassandra studied him. “Then what are you going to do?”
Saetan picked up his cane. “Love her. That will have to be enough.”

“Daemon had written: "What do you do when she asks a question no man would give a child an answer to?"
Saetan had replied: "Hope you're obliging enough to answer it for me. However, if you're backed into a corner, refer her to me. I've become accustomed to being shocked.”

Dear Readers,
In the Realms of the Blood, the war has been fought,

Dear Readers,
In the Realms of the Blood, the war has been fought, the battle has been won, and the epic tale has been told. But life goes on, so there are other challenges to face, smaller battles to be fought, and other stories to tell.

This is one of them.

“When we have sex, does your penis weep with gratitude?”
A handful of answers flashed through his mind. If he said any of them, he would end up sleeping in the Consort’s room. Alone.
“In what context?” he asked.
She lowered the book. Since he’d acknowledged being awake, he raised his head and read the passage. Then he read it again.
“Sweetheart, if my penis ever does that, you will be the first to know. Not as my wife, but as a Healer.”

“Marian sank down on one of the kitchen chairs and braced her head in her hands. He got mad at her for sweeping up spilled sugar but dragged her outside to throw a skillet at bales of hay. She threw a pot at him and missed, so he was going to teach her how to clobber him with a skillet. Even taking into account that he was an Eyrien male, there was only one explanation for his behavior. The man was insane.”

“It is easier to kill than to heal. It is easier to destroy than to preserve. It is easier to tear down than to build. Those who feed on destructive emotions and ambitions and deny the responsibilities that are the price of wielding power can bring down everything you care for and would protect. Be on guard, always.”

“I met your daughter recently. I asked her if she found it difficult living with your temper. She looked genuinely baffled, and said, ‘What temper?’”
Saetan stared at her for a moment, then the anger drained away. He rubbed the back of his neck, and said dryly, “Jaenelle has a unique way of looking at a great many things.”

There’s a kind of literary tradition that after a prolonged absence, the hero and heroine fall romantically into each other’s arms and indulge in three pages of athletic sex – gruelling for both reader and participants alike. You might want to brace yourself for disappointment. Firstly, because Leon hadn’t been well for some time which meant . . . well, you know. And secondly because Markham jammed a gun in the back of my neck and tried to shoot me. Some days I don’t know why I bother to get out of bed.

” You will want to be careful what you leave within beaking range. Hillary, they tell me, is particularly fond of hard-boiled eggs.’
‘Isn’t that like some form of cannibalism for them?’
She nodded. ‘Eating one’s young.’
‘Eating one’s young is a hugely underestimated weapon in the parental arsenal.’

‘Let us all think carefully. Who here has the least value? Who has annoyed me the most?’ He turned to face me. ‘Who is in need of a much-deserved lesson?’
‘No idea,’ I said.
‘Oh, I think you do.’
‘Well, yes, I do, but I thought it would be rude to point out it’s you. Not in front of your men. Although it would be good to stop you talking before everyone dies of boredom.’

But I’m no hero. I’m more of a last resort, a scorched-earth policy. I’m the person you hire when the heroes have already come home in body bags.

“You try what?” I snort. “Oh, so now you’re trying to help me? What you said before, that was meant to help me?”
Ma’ii stares at me flatly. “I know you do not believe it, but I am always trying to help you, Magdalena.”
“You are always trying to help yourself.”
“Can I not do both at once?”
“No, you cannot do both at once.”

They say the hataałii worked hand in hand with the construction crews, and for every brick that was laid, a song was sung. Every lath, a blessing given. And the Wall took on a life of its own. When the workmen came back the next morning, it was already fifty feet high. In the east it grew as white shell. In the south, turquoise. The west, pearlescent curves of abalone, and the north, the blackest jet. It was beautiful. It was ours. And we were safe. Safe from the outside world, at least. But sometimes the worst monsters are the ones within.

“Everything,” Rose said, “is a reaction. Every choice grows from the consequences of another choice. An ocean of ripples from countless pebbles thrown.”
Weiss struck one last match. He held it up between them, casting a flickering orange glow across Rose’s gray veil.
“It feels like somebody lit a long, slow fuse,” he said. “All these years it’s been quietly sizzling down. And it’s almost at the end.”

“Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been here before? That everything happening has happened?” Nessa shrugged. “Everyone does, now and again. A trick of the mind.”

”…I have nothing left. Nothing but Renata. And so long as Aita and Lodovico draw breath, she will never be safe. I’m nothing now, Leggieri, nothing but a cornered rat.” He leaned close, looming over the artist with fire in his eyes. His voice dropped to a graveyard whisper. “But a cornered rat can still bite.”

“This is Mari, my knight. Mari, this is Viper, your new cousin.”
Viper snorted. “No relation of mine ’til she’s blooded proper. And a knight? She doesn’t look like much to me.”
“Try me,” Mari replied. “Or do you only spar with girls half your size? I could get on my knees and fight you that way, if it makes you feel safer. And I’ll still win.”

“Lay one hand on her,” Mari said, “and I break every bone from the tip of your index finger to your shoulder.”
He stared down at her, momentarily caught off guard. He tried to smirk, but he couldn’t quite hide the nervous edge in his eyes. “That’s a big boast for a little girl.”
“Not a boast. A statement of fact. So that when you force me to cripple you, you’ll understand exactly what’s happening to you and why. I wouldn’t want there to be any confusion.”

“We fooled him once,” Hedy said, her voice soft. “And that was luck. My master isn’t coming to save us, Renata. We’re all alone.”
Chains rattled as Renata turned. She took gentle hold of Hedy’s chin, lifting her face. “Fine, then,” Renata told her. “We’ll just have to save ourselves.”

“I have not failed, because the contract is still open. I am still murdering him. I am in the process of murdering him as we speak. I am murdering him right now, with my mind.”

“And that is the difference between a church and a god. How could I be angry at a god for something a church did?

“I do not need,” she said, “to cry. My father is dying. My brother is a worthless glutton who’s leading this church, my church, down the road to ruin. And if I’d been born with a cock between my legs, I’d have the power to stop him, instead of being the useless daughter just waiting to be married off to some foreign aristocrat.”
“Livia, I—”
Livia held up her hand. “Have you ever considered, for even a moment, the list of things I’m not allowed to do because some bitter old men say so? I can’t lead a mass, can’t earn the greens of a priest, let alone claim my birthright. My entire life, from the cradle to the grave, is dictated by ‘traditions’ and rules that you aren’t subject to. My power was taken away from me the moment I was born a woman. So no, you do not get to give me permission to cry!”