Emery Robin > Quotes

“Life! - Life, its sea and sky, the heat of blood and breath. Life: In it was every color, was the weight of brick on brick and foot on stone, was hunger and thirst and shivering from rain, was swifts and seagulls and dragonflies and sand, was meat, was bread, was salt. Life, my life, my sight and taste and touch, the only things I had that were mine alone, that had come into the world with me and that when I left the world would never be again. Heart and lungs, hands and tongue, elbows and teeth and liver and cheeks and spine and breasts and brain, those parts of me that had not been thrown to the winds with my sister or the ashes of my friend, the heavy animal parts of me that every minute sang the oldest hymn: I want, I want, I want to live. Despite it all, I want to live.”
― Emery Robin, The Sea Eternal

“...I felt a kind of pity, and was reminded not for the first time how close pity was to disgust.”
― Emery Robin, The Stars Undying

“Her expression might almost have been one of pity. "In another life, Madam Oracle," she said, "in another life, I think you and I could have been friends."
"We only get one life," I said.”
― Emery Robin, The Stars Undying

“When I was very young, I thought everyone in the world must have a twin somewhere. How else would they know their reflections?”
― Emery Robin, The Stars Undying

“And when you are educated, when you have read enough stories and when you know enough about the story you are listening to, you grow to expect the death of the hero, and when death comes, the end of anticipation is even a relief.”
― Emery Robin, The Stars Undying

“I'm afraid that it's too late for us,' she said. 'That there was a moment, back when - oh, I don't know, when you came to me in my barge at Plyusna, when you kissed me the night after Ceirran died. When I rolled out of the carpet. Perhaps we will be great, you and I. But I'm afraid there was a moment when we might have been wise enough, or kind enough, or brave enough, or good enough that we could have seen our way to being happy. Happy for eternity.”
― Emery Robin, The Sea Eternal

“A man that keeps Ana Decretan as his intimate, who is sick over the table of her entertainers while Galvao Arcadian fights her battles in Far Madinabia, might well consider degeneracy a type of friendship," he said. "You, who keep your people in bondage with madness or with lies and call that government, might well consider going to your knees a type of friendship. But Ciao is of a different substance - and what you hold in your had will always be anathema to it.”
― Emery Robin, The Stars Undying

“You know why they behave like this, don't you" he said. "Insist everyone act as they do, enter into their wonderful liberation? They're a lonely people. Seeing someone without their ideals frightens them. They want to embrace him, to bring him into the fold. But however far they spread their thinking, the loneliness never goes away.”
― Emery Robin, The Stars Undying

“Do you ever feel that the world's used up?' she said. 'That our father and their fathers had the fat of it, and left us the bones. And when we tell our children that this was how we lived, they won't know what we mean. And the days are growing short again.”
― Emery Robin, The Sea Eternal

“If you had any decent power, civilisation would be whatever you happened to be doing at the moment.”
― Emery Robin, The Stars Undying

“When you are held in the mouth of a god, sometimes the best you can do is let yourself be swallowed and call it homecoming.”
― Emery Robin, The Stars Undying