City of Stairs Quotes

“And Olvos said to them: “Why have you done this, my children? Why is the sky wreathed with smoke? Why have you made war in far places, and shed blood in strange lands?

And they said to Her: “You blessed us as Your people, and we rejoiced, and were happy. But we found those who were not Your people, and they would not become Your people, and they were willful and ignorant of You. They would not open their ears to Your songs, or lay Your words upon their tongues. So we dashed them upon the rocks and threw down their houses and shed their blood and scattered them to the winds, and we were right to do so. For we are Your people. We carry Your blessings. We are Yours, and so we are right. Is this not what You said?”

And Olvos was silent.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Forgetting... is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself... For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was & there was only ever a butterfly.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Humans are strange. … They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that they are important. … it's vanity.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“I don't have the time or the energy to hate," says Shara. "I only wish to understand. People are what they are.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Life is full of beautiful dangers, dangerous beauties... They wound us in ways we cannot see: an injury ripples out, like a stone dropped in water, touching moments years into the future.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“...history, as you may know, is much like a spiral staircase that gives the illusion of going up, but never quite goes anywhere.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Is it ignorance if you don’t care to know it?” “Yes. That is almost the definition of ignorance, actually.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“I never saw a country before," says the robed man. "All I saw was the earth under my feet.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important - that they are important. You don't get punished for doing something unimportant, after all.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“I have never met a person who possessed a privilege who did not exercise that privilege to the fullest extent that they possibly could.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Historians, I think, should be keepers of truth. We must tell things as they are - honestly, and without subversion. That is the greatest good one can do.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“The gods are cruel not because they make us work. They are cruel because they allow us to hope.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves.... Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.
She felt overwhelmed. It was--she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library--a lot like being in love for the first time.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“I am lost among the seas of fate and time
But at least I have love.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“I am sorrowful. I am sorrowful that I happened to be born into a world where being disgusted with yourself was what you were supposed to be. I am sorrowful that my fellow countrymen feel that being human is something to repress, something ugly, something nasty. It's... It's just a fucking shame. It really is.

I am penitent. I am penitent for all the relationships this shame has ruined. I am penitent that I've allowed my shame and unhappiness to spread to others. I've fucked men and I've fucked women, Father Kolkan. I have sucked numerous pricks, and I have had my pricked sucked by numerous people. I have fucked and been fucked. And it was lovely, really lovely. I had an excellent time doing it, and I would gladly do it again. I really would. I have been lucky enough to find and meet and come to hold beautiful people in my arms - honestly, some beautiful, lovely, brilliant people - and I am filled with regret that my awful self-hate drove them away.

I don't know if you made the world, Father Kolkan. And I don't know if you made my people or if they made themselves. But if it was your words they taught me as a child, and if it's your words that encourage this vile self-disgust, this ridiculous self-flagellation, this incredibly damaging idea that to be human and to love and to risk making mistakes is wrong, then... Well, I guess fuck you, Father Kolkan.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“History will not let us forget: it wears disguises, reintroduces itself to us, claims it is someone new and wonderful. But let us not forget.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Scars are windows to bitterness—it is best to leave them untouched.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Voters might have short memories. Politicians do not.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it’s not corruption at all—it’s law. Unspoken, unwritten, but law.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Just because the nightmare you expected comes true, it doesn't make it any less terrifying.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“The soul might be within the eyes, but the subconscious, the matter of their behavior; that is in the hands. Watch a man's hands, and you watch his heart.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Nations have no morals,” says Shara, quoting her aunt from memory. “Only interests.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“There is no crueler hells then committee work....”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Envy the fire, for it is either going or not. Fires do not feel happy, sad, angry. They burn, or they do not burn.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“We are—or were—Divinities, Shara Komayd: we drew power from the hearts and minds and beliefs of a people. But that which you draw power from, you are also powerless before... A people believe in a god... and the god tells them what to believe.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“The city knows. It remembers. Its past is written in its bones, though the past now speaks in silences.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“In retrospect they might have started sleeping together solely out of conversational exhaustion.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“When in doubt, be patient, and watch.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“We all reconstruct our past because we wish to see how our present came to be our present - do we not?”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Good historians keep the past in their head and the future in their heart.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs