The Tyrant Baru Cormorant Quotes

“To maintain trim is to act in a way that puts the well-being of others before your own. Not in the hope of reward or advantage, but in the knowledge that the only way to a good world is for all people to put themselves second so that all people will be put first. To keep good trim, you must be a good friend to those around you, so your own happiness and health must be maintained. But it is also good trim to go to your enemy, and to offer forgiveness and recompense, to deliver yourself into their judgment: that is a high act of trim.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Empire planted that killing tree on Kyprananoke, where the rebels dashed children dead against the trunk.
The only answer to empire is to move the tree.
It is not justice. But there is no such thing as justice. Only the measureless and asymbolic truth. Who prospers. Who suffers. Who lives in glory. Who dies in chains.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Yes, people had always been evil nearly as much as they had been good. Yes, happiness was rarer than suffering - that was simply a fact of mathematics; happiness required a narrow range of conditions, and suffering flourished in all the rest.
But Falcrest was not an innocent victim of a historical inevitability. Empire required a will, a brain to move the beast, to reach out with an appetite, to see other people as the answer to that appetite, to justify the devouring of other peoples as right and necessary and good, to frame slavery and conquest as acts of grace and charity.
Incrasticism had provided that last and most fateful technology. The capability to justify any violence in the name of an ultimate destiny, an engine to inflict misery and to claim that misery as necessary in the quest for utopia. A false science by which the races and sexes could be separated and specialized like workers in a mill. And the endless self-deceptive blind guilty quest to justify that false science, so that the suffering and the misery remained necessary.
Falcrest had chosen empire.
Falcrest could therefore be held responsible for its choice.
Not all those who lived in Falcrest participated in its devourings. But all those who lived in Falcrest had benefited from them, and by encouragement or by passive acceptance they had allowed those devourings to continue.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Yes, Juris thought. Keep trying. Keep finding wrongs, and naming them, and trying to make them right. Never stop. Even now.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“You cannot destroy the masters by mastering them. You destroy them by destroying.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Power can't be separated from its history. A choice can't be taken in isolation from its context. Power is the ability to set the terns of the riddle. To arrange the rewards and punishments for which the choice is judged.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Baru was Farrier's monument, his exemplar, his masterpiece. A degenerate child molded into a brilliant Imperial agent. A tribadist who, even when dispatched into rebel woods to consort with warrior duchesses, enforced her own chastity until the night before the end. A traitor who would voluntarily return to Falcrest, to her own repression and to Farrier's control. Because she believed she was a savant, a hard woman, someone who sacrificed what she must in order to do what was necessary. Someone who *had* to be alone.
Behold the chains he placed on you.
His law lived in Baru. Everything she accomplished was tainted by it.
If I show you favor, woman, then you will die.
And through that death I will progress.
She wore an invisible mask: the laughing face of Cairdine Farrier, carved into the skull of her soul.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“A cultural misconception sustained by lurid rumor? In our great republic?”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“I’m not the kind of immortal who never dies, Baru. Just the kind who lives forever.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“It’s very rude to get cunt on your mother,”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“The power was in the Throne behind the throne.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“You will know your ruin well. You will put yourself into it as you have put yourself into us, thinking that it is your will. But it is your doom that moves you thus. And your flesh will be filled with ruin, as you have come to bring ruin into us.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“cancer is the aristocracy of the body. It captures the means of growth for its own use. It convinces the body to serve it, and delivers nothing in return.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Monsters can be charming, when they know you’re watching. They have a magnetism about them.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“But at least there is revenge, which is like justice the way saltwater is like fresh.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Baru felt a profound empathy for her attacker. Falcrest has cut your people, cut off lips and balls and fingers and tongues, and you cannot get justice. You cannot wait for history to turn in your favor.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“The Throne likes to see conspiracies everywhere. The real world never fits together so well.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Sometimes smiling is work.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Oriati Mbo would not be asked to yield its pride or culture or its political independence. This was a trade dispute, the Falcresti said. A market correction. For many decades, Oriati Mbo had overvalued its strength, and undervalued Falcrest's.
Violence had been transacted as a result.
The treaty put a name to the whole tragedy. It would be called the Armada War. As if it had all been fought at sea, among the willing and the glorious. As if burnt Kutulbha had been a particularly large ship.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“They were insane. They were insane and it made perfect sense to Barhu because this madness was, like her, made by Falcrest: a pattern of authority by bodily violence which remained, like a scar, after Falcrest departed.
This terror was ultimately created by the Kyprists, by their ruthless barbers and their use of mass thirst as a weapon. Kyprism was in turn an artifice created by Falcrest's decapitation of all Kyprananoke's traditions and the installation of a biddable new ruling class. No matter how vivid and imminent the horrors here, Falcrest was in a distant but powerful way responsible.
But Barhu could not bring herself to forgive the Pranist and his warband.
No matter the cause, these were people doing evil. To absolve them of guilt would be to deny their humanity, to deny that they had some intrinsic dignity and moral independence which only they could choose to surrender. To say that these people were doing monstrous things entirely of their own monstrous nature was to deny Falcrest's immense historical crimes. But to say that these people were doing monstrous things solely because Falcrest had made them into monsters was to grant Falcrest the power to destroy the soul: to permanently remove the capacity for choice.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Baru, intellectually calibrated and mentally awakened to the highest planes of aesthetic and philosophical appreciation, stared at her tits.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“I know she was telling the truth. She’s calm when she lies. It’s the truth that makes her start shouting, because it scares her.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“You young people think a book’s like a lover, maybe you want one, maybe you don’t—”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“No. That was accountant logic, the logic that had failed her in Aurdwynn. Because numbers alone couldn’t count what Tain Hu had meant to her. She was one life on paper and yet a universe to Barhu.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant

“I seem insane to you,” Barhu countered, “because I know things you do not.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“True power was not the ability to conduct a killing or a business deal or an assignation but to alter the context by which those acts were judged and evaluated.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Power can’t be separated from its history. A choice can’t be taken in isolation from its context. Power is the ability to set the terms of the riddle. To arrange the rewards and punishments by which the choice is judged.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“I am the one who will always obey, because I can always rationalize my obedience as my own will.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“if you answer well enough, not just about what they should do but why they should do it … then they learn to think as you think, and to make the choices you would choose. And you lead them without a word, from a thousand miles away, because you are with them in the shape of their thoughts.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“She lays down the next stone on the path, the road that Farrier thinks he is leading her down. That’s the trick, she thinks. You let them choose which road to follow. But first, you have your people build the roads.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant