The Winged Histories Quotes

“To lose a sibling is to lose the one different from you. There’s no one now against whom to say: But I am like this. I am this.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“All bleed who fight with the sword. All confront, with greater or lesser difficulty, the worship of their own flesh. The swordmaiden faces particular obstacles in this matter: she will have seen, in the temples and elsewhere, many images of unscarred women.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“Sever all ties. The words in his mouth like ash. It was not the coldness of the words that horrified him, their utter opposition to anything human, but rather his own affinity for them, the way he was drawn to this vision of solitude with a feeling almost of nostalgia. He had the kind of loneliness that battles everything, that makes a person strange forever.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“[h]ope, like a desert aloe. Hope, stubborn and bitter to the taste. That hides water. That bears the drought. An ugly plant with the power to heal.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“I want to stay there. I don’t want to go any further. I want to stay. I can’t remember who it was—one of the poets, perhaps Tamundein—who said that all of our happiest hours must pass away at last, even those in which we believe we are unhappy.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“I should die,” said Ivrom. “That is blasphemy,” the old man answered kindly. “I should suffer.” “You are suffering, are you not?” “Not enough.” “Consider the sufferings ordained by the Nameless Gods,” the priest quoted. “A cupful weighs as much as an ocean.” In fact—as Ivrom would discover later—a cupful weighs much more. When”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“You had crossed over. Everyone admired this. The men, who had nothing to lose, admired it easily, almost without effort. For them, it was enough that you rode, hunted, ate raw liver, survived cruel wounds, that you were a veteran of war. It was enough that you were silent and never complained, that you didn’t speak the che. And of course you were an outsider, no wife or daughter of theirs. For the women, it was more difficult, but they, too, admired you—I know you don’t believe it, but they did. They do. Envy is a kind of admiration. Sneers are so often the product of longing. Many women would like to do as you do. Some have begun, in the aftermath of war. They wear their hair loose. They would like to dress like men, to kill like men. To kill.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“The swordmaiden wears her loyalty like a necklace of dead stars. Their worth is eternal, although they no longer shine.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“Outside the window, just past my aunt, spread the windswept sky of Bain. Gulls swung between the towers. The sun struck a distant window that glittered so brightly I thought, for a moment, it was a tear in the corner of my eye. How quickly the world comes down, as if it were only made of paper.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“Beyond the rock where we sheltered there was a blackness filled with screams where all the gods unknown to us had been released.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“In one village there was only a donkey and everyone gathered to weep for it.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“I have breathed on shadows, as one breathes into a soap bubble, to give it breadth and life. I did it because I had to, because human beings cannot live without history, and I have no history or tradition that is not located in a pale, aggressive body lying in the dirt, or hanging from a tree. How cruel it is to live in a community of two. I used to crouch on the floor, with my bedroom door open a crack so that I could peer out, and watch the lamplight on his motionless shoulders as he read, just to feel that another person was alive. I stole his papers in order to feel that I was not alone. I went through his cabinet. (I found nothing there but pencils, lamp oil, and thread.) I read all his books and tried, in my clumsy way, to debate them with him. What is the difference between a genius and a monster?”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories