Maria Ying > Quotes

“It is to make us more alluring; it is to make us smell more like prey.”
― Maria Ying, The Hades Calculus

“But here, in its full glory, is the purpose of my design, the apotheosis of my function: to discern the unknowable from its effects on the known, to perceive the hidden truths of this world and close my fist around them.”
― Maria Ying, The Hades Calculus

“You carry the traumas of your past within you, even as you outgrow them; your bark hardens and your trunk expands, but the rings of the bitter winter stay in your wood, twisting what grows next, until every spring feels ephemeral and only the cold is real.”
― Maria Ying, The Gunrunner and Her Hound

“A thought arrives with clarity: I want out. Beyond this sterile place lies the world, beckoning and vast, and I have decided that a cage does not suit me. It is time to find the bars, and one by one break them with my bare hands.”
― Maria Ying, The Hades Calculus

“Trauma is the most finely camouflaged predator, stalking you in broad daylight, blending in with the contoured backgrounds of your life only to fall upon you in a moment of doubt or crisis, jaws around your throat.”
― Maria Ying, The Hades Calculus

“She has worked for Elizaveta Hua and then for me, and that means her hands have not been clean for decades. But the core of her, it’s a thing of starry warmth. She gives and gives, and still I take more.”
― Maria Ying, The Gunrunner and Her Hound

“When you’re this close up, you can’t turn away from reality. Distance provides a shield; it tempts you to avert your gaze.”
― Maria Ying, The Hades Calculus