The Tangled Lands Quotes

“I think of philosophers as drug-addled dreamers who see only the reflections cast on their blackboards. The shadows of the world as it really exists around them. They say there is no such thing as good and evil. They talk about choice and flux, intersections and perspectives and situations ..... They may well be correct. Who am I, an old peasant mother, to question those who spend their lives poring over these questions?”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Tangled Lands

“I've seen the remains of wars. And the men never seem to remember the women running from the sword as they guided the army's packhorses to the frontline, and they always forget who bandaged the wounded through every skirmish. When the songs are sung about great battles. the women who helped sustain, feed, and build the army, who donated their husbands to the cause: they are always somehow forgotten. You forget that they are just as good at war as men. They fade in your memory only because they didn't share the glory of the front line, even though they often shared the losses and deaths.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Tangled Lands

“It's easy to fail yourself, but failing before another, one who has watched you wager so much and so mightily on an uncertain future - well, that is too much shame to bear”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Tangled Lands

“The drug of bramble had been used by assassins and thwarted lovers. Its poison produces an overwhelming sleep that succumbs to deeper darkness. It squeezes the heart and slows it until blood flows like cold syrup, and then stops entirely, frozen, preserving a body, sometimes for years, until rats and mice and flies burrow deep and tear the body apart from within.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Tangled Lands