A Conspiracy of Truths Quotes

“Who you are isn't the thoughts in your head or the fears in your heart or the name someone else gives you or takes from you. Who you are is what you do. It's the actions you take, or that you don't take. It's the way that you help people, or don't. It's the good that you put into the world, or the bad.”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“It's messy, lad, it's all messy." I waved my hand airily. "You just question everything that anyone tells you and assume they don't really know what they're talking about, even when they sound like they do, and you remember that everybody has a reason for telling you something in the way that they do and that most reasons are selfish.”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“Tell a good story that will catch and hold their attention or die.”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“Nuryevet wasn't a real thing--it was a story that people told one another. An idea they constructed in fantasy and then in stone and mortar, in lines of ink in labyrinthine law books, in cities and roads. It was a map, if you will, drawn on a one-to-one scale and laid out over the whole landscape like so much smothering cloth. So when I say there was nothing in Nuryevet worth saving, that's what I mean: the story wasn't worth saving, and none of its monstrous whelps were either--the government, their methods, the idea that they could feed their poor to the story like cattle to a sea monster so the wealthy could eat its leavings.”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“She's more like me than Ylfing is—more like me than I would admit to just anyone. I think that's why we clash as we do. We see a mirror of ourselves in each other, and neither of us can come up with a story about ourselves to disguise it. It's uncomfortable and upsetting to have yourself stripped naked down to the bedrock of your soul with one hard glance from someone as unsympathetic as yourself.”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“Ylfing looks at anyone and sees the best thing about them, sees their kindness, their loves, whatever little whisper of divine grace they have within them.”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“The commander of one army, or battalion if you’re all broken up over a distance, writes insulting letters to the enemy commander, and their messengers run them back and forth, and then they say, well, let's meet in two days on the hill with the big rock that looks like a nose. And then they get their troops to polish all their boots and armor, and everyone trots out in the morning two days later, and they have a fight. And someone goes home and someone doesn't. I mean I've read a lot of foriegn books about how to do war differently, but I don't see why you would, unless you were a dirty cheat. This way has rules and everyone knows how to play it, and you know who wins fair and square.”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“You fill out a lot of forms. Then you fill out some different forms. Then you hire a new assistant for this case only because the forms have to be filed in quintuplicate and filed with the office of each Prime, separately, and one simply does not have enough hours in the day. Then you go home, really tired, to your family having eaten dinner at your desk again. And you fall straight into bed without enough energy to do more than kiss the children and spouses goodnight. And the next morning you get up and fill out more forms, and you visit the clarks to see if anyone has read your requests, and they say no. And you do this once a day for a week or so. And if you’ve filled out all the paperwork perfectly, then you flip a coin to determine whether or not they unseal the records for you.”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“Optimism is the surest sign of a fool”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“What does that mean, the way people are?” “Customs! Manners! Languages! The ten thousand gods of ten thousand nations! The tales they tell their children when they wake from nightmares, the tales they tell their sons and daughters when they send them off to war, the tales a midwife tells a laboring mother, the tales old men tell each other in the twilight of their lives.” “So you are a spy—sort of.”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“She’d make Nuryevet a strong country, unified again under one ruler, a country where the men were beautiful and the women were powerful and the children were healthy and bright-eyed
(comment: I love how the author switches gender norms and normalizes it off-handedly throughout the book)”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“But that was before everything really started going to sh&t. And it went sh&t, you see, because Nuryevens have these wonderful coins. And the great thing about coins is that they’re imaginary. You laugh, but it's true!
If you take out one bit of silver and I say, this is worth one good horse, then you have to consent to be part of my hallucination. And then we have to get a bunch of other people on board with it until we are all collectively hallucinating that this little bit of metal is worth one good horse, or three goats … or however many bushels of wheat. You get the picture. Coins are imaginary, the metal that makes them up is real, but the magic that makes them coins instead of metal with pictures on, that's all in our heads. And it's a damn painful thing to wake up to, you know?”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“They swore up and down that Nuryevet was no different than any other place, that it was normal. They had gone out for their want, both of them, to tell me how lucky they were, how lucky they were that they got to choose the person that exploited the office for gain, to have money rung from them like they were dishrags. There were other choices available, lots of others, but such a thing had never occurred to them. They knew in their bones that they were lucky with what they had. Yes, Nuryevet was already sickly when I arrived.”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“And I’m thinking of marrying a couple friends of mine, see.”
I had to pause for a moment there.
“Plural friends?”
“Yeah, good business match it would be.We’ve been close since we were kids.
“Perhaps my Nuryeven isn’t as good as I thought. When you say marry, you mean joining your households together and producing hiers, yes?”
It wasn’t that the concept was alien to me, it’s just that I hadn’t expected such an arrangement to be commonplace in Nuryevet. Well, no, I’ll be honest, iots that I hadn’t spent even a blink of time thinking about their practices, and if you’d asked me at that time I probably would have told you that all Nuryevens lumber along like they're made of stone. Not a drop of hot blood in their bodies and no interest whatsoever in romance, and that they acquired children by filing paperwork in quintuplicate and being assigned one by an advocate.
My new friend Ilias said, “Iy that’s right, though I don't think that Anya and Micket will care to manage it themselves. Heirs are cheap though. You can scrape together half a dozen of them right off the street. So longs you've got flxible standards”
I shook my head, “Is this a common thing in these parts?”
“Ey? Oh, iy, common enough. I’ve seen marriages with more partners than that.” He pulled his chair to face me fully.
“The Oomack only ever have two partner marriages, did you know that? And it's not about business. They don't even seem to care about their assets at all!”
“Well, no, the Oomack marry for love and sex.”
“Is that right? That seems messy. Lots of feelings involved if you combine sex and business.”
Ilias had certain opinions, shall we say which may have not been representative of the general Nuryeven philosophy. Marriage here is a great amalgamation of every kind legal partnership. They get married when they are going into business together. They get married when they want to own property jointly. They get married when they're in love. Some of these arrangements do involve a physical element or the biological production of heirs, as they do elsewhere. Some, as Ilia mentioned before, simply involve formally adopting half a dozen heirs off the street. Some are a mere legal formality. Like many things in Nuryevet , you can do as you please so long as you’ve got your paperwork in order. I didn’t quite understand all this at the time. It took me a while to glean the intricacies of it, or rather, the lack of intricacies. At the time, I only asked Ilia if he had a separate lover.
“Not right now. I hire a private contractor for that.”
“A prostitute you mean??”
“No, a contractor. Prostitutes are, well you’re foreign, you wouldn't know. We don't have those here. Prostitutes just stand on the street and don't have a license or pay taxes, right? They juits have sex with whoever in an ally.”
“Oh… some of them, in some places. In other places.” I waved vaguely, “ higher status.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning they’re more expensive. Meaning they do other things besides the act. In some places they're priests and priestesses. In some places they're popular society figures with property and businesses, patrons of the arts and so forth.”
“Here you hire one of them like you’d hire a doctor or a tailor or someone to build a house for you, and you wouldn’t graba just anybody off the street for that would you. They show you their l;icence and you sign a contract together and so on. It's a good system.”
“What about those who don't have a licence?”
“Arrested! Just like a doctor practicing without a license would be.”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“Sometimes as a Chant you can sense the shape of the things that people are carrying around in their hearts. A Chant spends so much of their life learning about how groups of people are in one place or another that they naturally come into a familiarity with the way individual people are. And the way that Consanza was? There was something big and tangled and complicated under her surface, something to do with Arjuneh, and her grandparents, and her daughter. There are many stories that aren’t mine to tell. And, more important, there are some that aren’t even mine to hear. Consanza carried a story in her heart that I would never have a hope of reaching, or even understanding if I did reach it, not in the way it deserved to be understood. But it was there and I could see the outlines of it, like the shadow of whale below a boat. If she wanted me to talk to Inga, then I would. And I did. But I can’t tell you about what we said. That’s not a story for you to hear.”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths