Jared Pechaček > Quotes

“We were something because we tell ourselves we were. But we can’t even agree on what we were.”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“The earth itself will remember us, Yarrow wanted to say. We've written our story on it with walls and towers.”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“Think: our stories are about ourselves. That’s why we care about them. That’s how we understand them. If we vanish, who will be left to understand and care?”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“The earth itself will remember us, Yarrow wanted to say. We’ve written our story on it with walls and towers. But that was a glib response, irrelevant and untrue.”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“A Guardian must protect, but a Guardian must also know how to read a fucking situation. Hawthorn herself had said that one day, when Kew had tried to protect another child from bullies and had been soundly beaten for his trouble. It was not her most inspiring maxim, but it had stuck with him.”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“If this beast measured time, it was not in heartbeats but in dreams. The rhythmic slosh of the subconscious was all the calendar it needed, and all the company it kept. But now and then it heard something from up above. When it did wake, it was always hungry. What did it eat? Oh, all kinds of things: the ends of turnips, cartwheels, babies, sunlight, crumbs. Once it quite enjoyed a potato.”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“Faced with this wealth, he could hardly bear the poverty he had been raised with. There hadn’t even been a way of knowing it was poverty until now.”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“The present was the same as the past. The future did not seem likely to differ.”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“There were also several small dusty miracles: crimson bread on a silver plate, a jug with a mouse running endless circles inside it, a little wooden bee. Ban tried to pick up the bread, but it screamed and writhed and bled, so they left it and the other miracles alone.”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“Was there no transfer of power that did not involve destroying the old?”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“Kew had never seen so many books, nor dreamed that they could exist. Volume after volume of poetry, history, songs, fables, botany, medicine. All the knowledge Hawthorn or the women could impart would hardly fill a shelf. He could stay here for days. Months. The rest of his life. And spend it on one bookcase.”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“I cannot see the future, but the shape of the future is the shape of the past. The seasons are not the only wheel at work in the palace. I tell you what has happened before so that you may know what happens again. I turn this wheel with my own turning. But that other wheel you will turn with heartache.”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“The lot of Grey is to bear,” said Yarrow. The spines on her hands and the back of her neck were stiff with dignity. “The lot of Black is to rule, the lot of Blue is to make, the lot of Yellow is to take, the lot of Red is to see and send, but beneath all these is Grey, the bedrock of the palace. And the bedrock does not say to the foot, ‘Why do you tread on me?”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“She was used to knowing. Or rather, she was used to knowing the limits of her own knowledge. But what happened in the tower lay so far beyond the bounds of her life that she could only call it holy. Holiness was a strange and terrible thing.”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“to think of it destroyed, unremembered and unmourned, that was unbearable.”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“and the old Lady began to turn. At first, she turned too quickly, and summer flickered over the palace like lightning, and winter breathed a single cold breath. Then she slowed, and learned the proper round of days. And ever since, she turns the wheel of the seasons, and watches the whole of the palace. As she laid down her virtue, the rise and fall of dynasties does not trouble her: she follows the will of the Lady of Black Tower. But sometimes she sees a person in need of a summer’s day, or another yearning for the cool of winter, and she grants it to them. This too is a great marvel of the Ladies.”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage

“A Guardian must protect, but a Guardian must also know how to read a fucking situation.”
― Jared Pechaček, The West Passage