Sofia Samatar > Quotes

“Once you have built something - something that takes all your passion and will - it becomes more precious to you than your own happiness. You don't realise that, while you are building it. That you are creating a martyrdom - something which, later, will make you suffer.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly? - No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there - the end of the books. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields.

Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It's a room in an old house. Or perhaps it's a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you've been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it's merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“I sat enchanted, far from my gods, adrift in the boat of spices, in the sigh of the South, in the net of the wheeling stars, in the country of dolphins.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“To lose a sibling is to lose the one different from you. There’s no one now against whom to say: But I am like this. I am this.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“These were the rains that drove people close to the walls, under the balconies, or sent them dashing madly through the squares, and drenched the fluttering ribbons and bright trappings of the horses so that their flanks were streaked with delicate watercolors. The storms washed the streets so that little streams of brown water went roaring along the gutters toward the sea, and thundered on the roofs of the cafés where people were crowded together laughing in the steam and half darkness. I loved those rains; they were of the sort that is welcomed by everyone, preceded by hot, oppressive hours of stillness; they came the way storms come in the islands but did not last as long, and often the sun came out when they had passed. I was happy whenever the rain caught me walking about in the streets, for then I would rush into the nearest café, along with all the others who were escaping from the weather, all of us crushing laughing through the doors. The rain allowed me to go anywhere, to form quick, casual friendships, forced to share one of the overcrowded tables, among the beaming waiters who pushed good-naturedly through the throngs carrying cups of steaming apple cider.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“The word for 'book' in all the known languages of the earth is vallon, 'chamber of words'...”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“I sat down in the wilderness with my books, and wept for joy.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“Long is the journey homeward, Weary and worn are we. Oh, if I fall behind, my love, Will you look back for?”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“The night sky was distended in my dreams, sinking to earth with the weight of destructive glory behind it. In one of those dreams I reached up and touched it gently with a fingertip, and it burst like a yolk, releasing a deluge of light.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“All through my journey his stories had fallen like snow. He was as full of them as a library with unmarked shelves. He was a talking book.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“All bleed who fight with the sword. All confront, with greater or lesser difficulty, the worship of their own flesh. The swordmaiden faces particular obstacles in this matter: she will have seen, in the temples and elsewhere, many images of unscarred women.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“The truth has its own virtue, which is separate from its content.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“[h]ope, like a desert aloe. Hope, stubborn and bitter to the taste. That hides water. That bears the drought. An ugly plant with the power to heal.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendour of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbour City, whose lights and colours spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart: it is the light the local people call 'the breath of angels'...”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“Sever all ties. The words in his mouth like ash. It was not the coldness of the words that horrified him, their utter opposition to anything human, but rather his own affinity for them, the way he was drawn to this vision of solitude with a feeling almost of nostalgia. He had the kind of loneliness that battles everything, that makes a person strange forever.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“One wants to ask what the hell his parents made him for--which, is you will recall, the central question of Frankenstein's monster. What the hell did you make me for, and why did you make me like this? To a failed experiment, the failure is unforgivable.”
― Sofia Samatar, Made to Order: Robots and Revolution

“Her small mouth opens and closes, a cave of light. And night falls down around me like a temple of broken glass.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“Words are sublime, and in books we may commune with the dead. Beyond this there is nothing true, no voices we can hear.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“There is enough cruelty in the world," she told me softly, "to justify all the music ever made.”
― Sofia Samatar, Tender

“It is ... courage to choose not what will make us happy, but what is precious.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in every direction, irrevocable.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“those who spend long hours engaged in reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“The silence had a depth to it, like the stillness after a bell has been struck and the echoes have died away, and one waits for what has been summoned.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“I should die,” said Ivrom. “That is blasphemy,” the old man answered kindly. “I should suffer.” “You are suffering, are you not?” “Not enough.” “Consider the sufferings ordained by the Nameless Gods,” the priest quoted. “A cupful weighs as much as an ocean.” In fact—as Ivrom would discover later—a cupful weighs much more. When”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“she ignited her heart by touching it to his; and after that there was no peace for either of them.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“I want to stay there. I don’t want to go any further. I want to stay. I can’t remember who it was—one of the poets, perhaps Tamundein—who said that all of our happiest hours must pass away at last, even those in which we believe we are unhappy.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“One is a River.
Everyone is a Sea.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

“His exaltation left no room for the human.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria