Skullsworn Quotes

“... we are all dying, all the time. Being born is stepping from the cliff's edge. The only question is what to do while falling.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“It takes work to keep the world whole. A simple thing like a cup needs to be cleaned each day, placed carefully back on the shelf, not dropped. A city, in its own way, is every bit as delicate. People move over the causeways, ply the canals with their oars, go between their markets and their homes, buy and barter, swindle and sell, and all the while, mostly unknowingly, they are holding that city together. Each civil word is a stitch knitting it tight. Every law observed, willingly or grudgingly, helps to bind the whole. Every tradition, every social more, every act of neighborly goodwill is a stay against chaos. So many souls, so much effort, so difficult to create and so simple to shatter.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“Ask a pig, sometime, about the trouble predicting the future from the past."

"I stared at him, trying to decide if he was joking. "I've been short on prognosticating pigs."

"Life is perfect for a pig," Ruc said. "Plenty of slops. A shed to keep off the rain. A good wallow. Every day for months a pig wakes up to the same perfect life. Sometimes for years. Then someone ties his hind legs together and cuts his throat while he squeals... The fact that my head's still attached at my neck doesn't mean no one's sharpening a knife.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“I've always thought it's strange that so much of the world remains unbroken. Take something as simple as a clay cup. So much time and effort goes into the making—the quarrying of the clay, the spinning on the wheel, the glazing, the firing, the painting—and yet it takes only a moment to destroy. No malign intent required, no violent design, just a moment’s inattention, a careless elbow, fingers too slick with wine, and the vessel drops, lands wrong, shatters. Most things are like this. Daily, by imperceptible degrees, a boat's hull warps with the sun, the rain, the heat, comes uncaulked, springs leaks. Rice takes months to grow from seed; Left wet, it will begin to rot overnight. Our human flesh is better than most things at keeping pace with its own decay, and yet it takes so little—a tiny knife dragged across the windpipe, a dropped roof tile, a puddle three inches deep—to unmake a man or woman. It’s amazing, given everything’s fragility, that we don’t live in a smashed world, all order and structure utterly undone, the whole land heaped with bone, charred wood, carelessly shattered glass. It amazes me sometimes that anything is still standing.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“Love is like killing,” she said. “You do it with every part of you, or not at all.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“Love is not some eternal state, but a delight in the paradise of the imperfect. The holding of a thing is inextricable from the letting go, and to love, you must learn both.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“It was watching the priestess in that moment, seeing her for what she was— stunning but bloody, gorgeous but mortal, bereft but joyful— that I understood, finally, about love. She had been telling me, but I couldn't see it, couldn't believe it until I saw her staring at the body of the man she'd loved, standing and singing, utterly undiminished by his absence. This was the lesson I couldn't learn even from a lifetime gazing into my own heart, from a million nights fighting Ruc or feeling him move inside me: Love is not some eternal state, but a delight in the paradise of the imperfect. The holding of a thing is inextricable from the letting go, and to love, you must learn both. The world was still beautiful—Ela felt that, and as she sang, I felt the music rising inside me finally, in my flesh and mind—the music of joy and all the wonder that cannot last, of joy, not in the having, but in the passage—and I opened my mouth to sing alongside her, to pour into the world that corporeal trembling without which our lives mean nothing, nor our deaths.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“I'd been treating love like a thing, an achievement, a trophy to be and hung around my neck. People talk about it that way sometimes. My love for you is undying. He never knew my love. It is an error of grammar to make love a noun. It is not a thing you can have. Love—like doubt or hate—is a verb. It has no fixity. Like song, it's truth is in its unfolding. Language is filled with these illusions. A fist, an embrace, A blow—they are actions, not things. Action takes time, and time is the tool of my god.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“There are moments in life when reason fails, when even the greatest genius is worth nothing. All the years studying, learning, training obscure the brutal fact that there are things we cannot know. A woman could pace out the distance between Dombâng and Rassambur, but the world is filled with spaces we can never measure, effects forever severed from their causes, furious motion for which the prime mover has been lost. It was possible Ananshael sent the spider, possible he did not. In the face of a god who resists all interrogation, the only way forward is faith.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“Killing is not something you do privately, in the space of your own head. It happens here.” She opened her arms, as though to embrace the whole world. “In the relationship between bodies…”

“It's the same with love,” she went on. “You're going at the whole thing as though it's a problem with you, inside of you, sealed off from the rest of the world. It's not. Love isn't a part of you or your lover. It's not something you can have, like a pile of gold or a pet pig. Love is this,” She said, gesturing into the emptiness between us. “The space between.”

“There's space everywhere,” I growled, “between everyone.”

“Don't be obtuse, Pyrre. It's the nature of the space that matters.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“Chua's friends set out looking not because they hope to find her, but because the thought of abandoning anyone to the delta was too awful to contemplate, because all of them secretly feared that one day it might be their canoe that capsized in a storm, because they could imagine wandering that watery maze alone, and because they hoped that if that happened someone would come looking for them.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn

“Death resists all comparison and simile. This is something I learned in my first year at Rassambur. To say death is like a land beyond the sea or like an endless scream is to miss the point. Death is not like anything. There is no craft analogous to Ananshael’s work. The truest response to his mystery and majesty is silence. On the other hand, to remain silent is to encourage the fantasies of the uninitiate— skulls brimming with blood, graveyard orgies, infants dangling like impractical chandeliers from the ceilings of candlelit caverns— and so maybe an imperfect analogy is better than none at all. Take a grape. The purple skin is muted, as if by mist or fog. Polish it, or not, then pop it into your mouth. The flesh is firm beneath the cool smooth skin. If you find yourself becoming aroused, stop. Start your imagining over. The grape is a grape. Imagine it properly, or this will not work. Now. What does the grape taste like? A grape tastes like a grape? Of course not. Until you bite the grape, it has no taste. It might as well be a stone lifted from the cold current of some river in autumn: a smooth, chill orb, reticent, flavorless. You could hold it trapped between your palate and tongue forever, with only the faintest hint of juice at the tiny breech where it was plucked from the stem. You are like that grape— plump with slick, rich sweetness, with wet purple life. The truth of life is the grape's truth: only when jaws bite down, when the skin splits, when the sun-cold flesh explodes onto the tongue does it matter. Without the moment of its own destruction, the grape is just a smooth, colorful stone. Without the foreknowledge of the woman who holds it in her hand, her anticipation, before it even passes her lips, of the mangled skin and the sweet life draining over the tongue, the grape would hold no savor…
We are not stones. Our human skin is thin, the life inside us bright. And death? The god I serve? He is the jaw locked around us, the promise of a sweet purple destruction without which we would be no more than so much polished rock.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn