Gilded Ashes Quotes

“Love is madness,” I say. “Doesn’t everyone agree that you’d do anything, endure anything, to be with the ones you love? So either you’re willing to let them use you with any sort of cruelty, so long as they keep you—which makes you a fool—or you’re willing to commit any cruelty, so long as you get to keep them—which makes you a monster. Either way, it’s madness.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“There are a lot of things I want," I say quietly and deliberately. "But I think I will keep what I have.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“People who want to be loved", I say, "always do the most idiotic things...”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“Halfway kindness is worse than none.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“I'm the girl who never gets angry and never wants anything, and that's why my family is still alive.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“«Speaking the truth is like gulping a mouthful of brandy: it burns on my tongue, but a moment after my body feels warmer, looser, freer.»”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“I never thought that freedom would feel so much like grief.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“Come. I was on my way to the park; I know a quiet spot where you can sit down."
"In public? With a servant?" I protest as he starts to draw me down the street.
"What is the point of being the duke's heir if I can't cause a scandal now and then?”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“I'm the son and heir to the Duke of Sardis. I could walk into that ballroom naked with Alcibiades balanced on my head, and they'd still want to marry me."

"Most likely. But if you try it, I'll horsewhip you on the front steps.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“For all his love, he let her go. He tried his best to escape her. I had not believed that anyone could love like that.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“I don't love him. But I take a treacherous delight in him.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“You don't love me," I say.
He sighs ruefully. "Maybe not. I can't help seeing you the way a starving man sees bread.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“I can't love him. I don't. This feeling is not the selfish, grasping need that I've seen tear apart my family, writhing through heir hearts like worms through rotten apples.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“I didn’t love you,” he says. “At least, I didn’t know it. I thought you were—lovely, and honest, and the only wife I could possibly respect. But you were right, I didn’t love you. I just thought you were an escape. And then I lost you. These past four days, when I thought you gone forever? Every book I read, I wondered what you’d think of it. Every idea I had, I wanted to ask your opinion. Every breath I took, I listened for your breathing beside me. Then I knew what you meant to me, and what you could have been to me. And then I fell in love with you.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“He's kissing me and though this is the first time, it feels like recovering a long-forgotten memory. My body seems to say, "Yes, this," and then I'm kissing him back as if I were born to be in his arms. I never realized how tightly guilt and fear had been wound about me until this moment, when they unwind into the air and fly away, leaving me with nothing but this guileless delight.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“Ghosts are laid to rest when injustices are righted, when their duties are fulfilled. But my mother's duty is to make me happy so long as I live. So there is not rest for her, and no escape for me. I will be happy and happy until it kills me.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“I know what it is like to live every day and every hour by the fruits of someone else's wretched bargain. To see people suffer and know that they suffer because I am loved.

I would not do that to the ones I love. Not for anything in the whole wide world.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“Don't worry," I say. "I have no interest in discussing your broken heart.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“Perhaps it’s time you stopped sulking over an engagement three years broken and bore yourself like a man!” The duke’s voice snaps like a whip. “Zeus and Hera, how did I beget such an unruly son?”

“If you’ve forgotten, perhaps you could summon up the dead and ask my lady mother.”

The duke barks a laugh. “You got that tongue from her, that’s for certain. But she was obedient to me for all her carping.”

“Obedient?” says Lord Anax. The desk creaks and shifts; I think he is leaning against it. “We must remember her very differently.”

“Always when it counted, my boy, which is more than can be said of you. I wanted that girl for my daughter, you know.”

“Adopt her, then. I believe it’s legal.”

“First I’d have to kill her parents,” says the duke, “and I am given to understand that’s frowned upon these days.”

“It’s gone the same sad way as the right of a father to execute his sons.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“Perhaps for him there's a way to love that's sane and happy, that isn't cruel.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“People who want to be loved," I say "always do the most idiotic things.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“I have another letter for you,” I say, pulling the slightly creased paper out of my pocket.

“I read the other one last night,” he says. “Verified all the quotations, too. Give me another day and I could track down all of the ancient sources from which your mistress drew her rhetorical figures, because—well, imitating six authors in two pages may be a good exercise, but with that many pieces stitched together, it’s impossible to hide the seams, let alone express an original thought.”

I remember Koré’s pale face when she handed me the letter this morning, her ink-stained fingers.

“She’s a very stupid person,” I say. “But it is neither lordly nor kind to sneer at her efforts.”

“You have an odd kind of loyalty.”

“You have an odd kind of tact. Or is that beneath the notice of a duke’s heir?”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

“And now you’ve assigned me a new job.” I wrinkle my forehead. “‘Our friends in the library’?”

He laughs. “The Resurgandi, of course. Everyone’s got a silly nickname for them, and that’s my father’s.”

“That footman can’t have believed it,” I say. “He’s gossiping with the other servants right now.”

“Oh, but I think he will believe it. There’s talk of inducting me, since I did so well at university, and you know how they cloak all their goings-on in secretive mummery. Oaths and hand signs and the like. Keeps them occupied, I suppose.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“I am going home. You and your lady can stay here and rot. Or have a tea party. I really don’t care.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“My back crawls with icy fear; it takes all my will not to duck behind statues and into doorways every time somebody passes me. The only thing that holds me to my steady, purposeful stride is the knowledge that if I run, I will look guilty, and if I look guilty, I will be caught, and if I am caught, I will be punished, and if I am punished, Mother will know and she can’t know, she can’t, she can’t.

My cheeks ache. I realize I’m smiling.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“Thea is kind and impulsive and very stupid. I’m not sure, sometimes, why she is still alive.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes

“Yo no lo amo.Pero tomo un traicionero deleite en él”
― Rosamund Hodge, Gilded Ashes