Days of Shattered Faith Quotes

“But always death, that great fascinator worn in the hair of religion.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“just because a thing’s a thousand years old doesn’t mean it won’t fall over if you kick it hard enough. Whether”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“You and I,” he says, “will not be friends forever. But let it be a year, ten years. Let us be old men when we come to blows.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“Like sea-gods to islanders and people of the coast, so death-gods to everyone, for obvious reasons. Sometimes one and the same, to those who truly understand the bottomless hunger of the waves and the depths. Not tax-gods. By the time taxation becomes relevant, the window for devising new gods tends to have closed. But death, most certainly.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“The Mordant, it was called, fitted out as a battery ship, rails strong with siege engines. Of a range to threaten any ship in harbour, certainly, and the city too, in need. Just sitting out there at anchor flying the Palleseen flag. Mordant, as in a thing that fixes colours so they won’t wash away.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“He was a polite brigand, as befitted an operation that was more talking your way over the doorstep than breaking the windows.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“What is it to be Croskin, thing of violence and resentment and enforced adherence to orders? Ask any soldier in the Palleseen Sway, they’ll tell you.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“He was a stern man. He was a man who did things by the ordinances. He kept his jacket buttoned and his conduct within the precise trammels of approved limits. And he did all of this because he was, at heart, a brigand. In another life he’d have been picking over bodies on a battlefield, surprising travellers in a lonely pass, leaping over the rails of a raiding ship. And he’d have set his actions to precisely fit the mores of those trades, too. Just because he knew book-keeping and could carry on a polite conversation didn’t mean he wasn’t as fiercely acquisitive as any cutpurse or bandit.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“A handful of departments, though, administered. Surely a tedious and inconsequential thing, a mere grease between the wheels of mightier engines. Save that it was administration that ran the Sway, without which do didn’t get done and know remained unknown. Valuations administered. Specifically it came in behind the maverick knowers and ahead of the humdrum doers – including the army if necessary – and totted up all the accounts to determine just what was known and what must be done.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“The majority of Palleseen departments did. The pieces of the machine, each to its small set task, up to and including the army, which did for foreign armed resistance on a grand scale. Some departments knew, a set of skills to be applied to a variety of tasks. Or else just knowledge looking for application, so that know could be turned into do as it had with necromancy or conjuration. Outreach knew, because every Outreach assignment was different. You couldn’t learn the tradecraft by rote.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“In her face were no platitudes, no It will be all right, no assurance that every action or event would be justified by gods or God or perfection or any of it. No admission that the world was anything other than a storm of chaos and misfortune. Misery and wickedness,”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“That didn’t sound like god stuff, to her. It maybe sounded like demon stuff. What it actually was, was Pal stuff. A people who never found anything useful they couldn’t boil down to words on paper. It was one reason why they kept winning.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“The role of the Resident, as pre-eminent representative of the Palleseen state within a nation under diplomatic relations and yet to be brought into the Sway, is (1) to act as the chief point of contact, representative, advocate and guardian of those legitimate citizens of Pallesand within the territory (2) to act as gatherer, focal point and reporter of intelligence generated within or arriving at the territory (3) and of overriding import, to guide and influence the local society and political structure to better favour, reward and comply with the ordinances of Pallesand, and thereby move all such Residented territories the closer towards perfection…”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“Look, you and I get to send a great trunk of money home on the next boat. Minus expenses, obviously. Have some expenses.” He tried to shove some coins at her, which was a step too far towards the venal and she diverted them back to the drinks pile.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“Rubbery, honest, venal, crooked, cheerfully avaricious, no-one you wanted as an enemy, nor to lend money to. It was like there were a dozen men overlaid one atop the other, impossible to know which was the real one. “You’re like a card trick,” she observed.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“A fascinating and oft-discussed piece of theoretical necro-thaumaturgy: that the living spirit of a person and their ghost, post-mortem, were things of such provably different natures.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“She was usually joking, and at the same time she was usually serious. It was a manner of tackling the world that experience had taught both of them. Sometimes a little humour was the only thing that cut through the pain to the truth.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“Caecelian’s wisdom: trouble came fastest from a clear sky; the unseen blade is hardest to parry. Misery and wickedness in all things. And she’d smile, that sun-bright flash of teeth, and Enshili would smile back.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“Jack hadn’t had much to be happy about back in the day. Now he was, and somehow that ray of sunshine that had touched him made people like him. Because he’d got what he wanted and just said This is enough. Jack would never stab you or sell you for another per cent of the take.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“They had been people once, from all walks of life, rich or poor. They had accumulated such a weight of debt in life, physical, emotional, existential, that they had chosen this last resort of those who needed to be free. The mask. The Grove. The mystery. Each one of them had been someone, once, and where were those someones now? Where does the knot go, when the string is pulled loose? Where the song, when the singer falls silent? Not even the ghost of it remains.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“A sincere man. A clear-eyed man. A man who believes. And there are demons and necromancers and monsters from beyond the Grove in the world, but none of them more dangerous than a man who believes.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“The constant round of ritual like coral building over the sunken ship of state, generation after generation, until what had once plied the waves with bold vigour was just an encrusted mass, entombed by its own ornament.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“The woman who he had come to lean on, a vine to a trellis, who had grown sick of the clutching, creeping prison her life had become.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“So that the old Empire word for a sage implied ‘one fit to be preserved’.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“The dark between moons poured in from the high windows and filled the room to bursting with night.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“pip”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith

“desperation was the prybar that opened foolish minds to divinity,”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Days of Shattered Faith