Vajra Chandrasekera > Quotes

“Remember, son,” Mother-of-Glory says, compensating with pomposity for her deficits of piety or affection. “The only way to change the world is through intentional, directed violence.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“Every time I led him to the right place at the right time, I first quietly eliminated all the places and times that were wrong. Luck is only someone else’s labour.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“I voted for peace, even though peace seems like the kind of science fiction that posits a future utopia, sleek and bald and rational, without satisfactory explanation of how we get to there from here, this convoluted, bloody *here*, except by appealing to our better natures at critical moments, a long arc bending towards justice. It seems like science fiction, wrapped in a pulp cover.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, Rakesfall

“Status is a rainbow on a proud soap bubble, inflated to its uttermost.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“Lessons learned in childhood leave deep roots and are not easily plucked out by adult reasoning.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“That’s not how laws work, son,” she says. “A visible law is a ploy, a little play. A mummery in waiting, waiting for you to become interesting. Never give them a reason to care who you are.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“She has so little room to live in, between the demands of her writers and her actor and her director, between the needs of her viewers and her readers. We rewatch and watch for her without blinking so that we can glimpse her in the spaces, the gaps between script and performance where Annelid slips through.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, Rakesfall

“-You mean that histories are true and stories are lies?
-No, both are true and both are lies.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, Rakesfall

“There is no such thing as devils. They are the people of lost histories. We see them only in translation.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“I sink deeper into his tissues, into the shadows within the cells. I smother mitochondria in the dark.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera

“Seeming biological realities are socially constructed: gender is only genre, race is a race to the bottom, species as arbitrary as specie. Seeming social realities are machinations of power hiding their inverse: slavery is called freedom to disguise its exploitation; ignorance is called strength, to champion political illiteracy; and most of all, most of all, war is called peace, the peace bought by murder, the peace of the unmarked mass grave.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, Rakesfall

“Kingsfaction stalwarts in various editorial teams. Fame, she says, is how a ruling class conditions artists to docility and incorporates their work to lesser ends. Sedition, unrest, and even revolution are useful to political actors currently out of power.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“Luriati military is called out and the newcomers shepherded into camps outside the city proper. The camps were occasional at first, Koel once remarked in group, and then seasonal, but now there are permanent camps, ever-growing, holding in quarantine those suspected of bearing plague or rebellion.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“The people follow the throne,” Salyut says. “As they always have.” “This is the lie princes tell themselves,” Ordinary says. “Power is in people.” “You think this uprising will win?”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“Her gravitational field does not have a crisp boundary but only weakens with distance; in theory, it has no end.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“a prophet of peace, for that was what he was becoming: he truly believed that peace could come from the ideological subjugation of all peoples of the world into an organized system of life, one that”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“You make the same mistake again and again,’ Ordinary says. ‘The sin of metonymy. I say people and you hear the people. I say power and you think of thrones and parliaments.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“It’s because none of them can see the devils, he thinks. That’s why they’re all so optimistic about worldly law.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“Either way, the email in triplicate teaches that he must deal with it three times over.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“His eyes are on me, not Fetter.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“I try to avoid dualities,” the Perfect and Kind says,”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“First Unforgivable. It’s not too late—you haven’t failed yet. One down, four to go. Do you remember what comes after matricide? Now you say it.” “Heresy leading to factionalism, sancticide of votaries who have reached the fourth level of awakening, patricide, and the assassination of the Perfect and Kind,” Fetter recites, the words scooped out with a jagged trowel from”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“a riot is a pogrom, and that when a monk of the Path Behind is on TV calling for peace from both sides, that it means that the Path Behind is once again attempting to cull the hinterlands of the pathless, and of the races and castes that they consider low and other:”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“Perhaps that distinction is finer than he’d thought. It means there’s no such thing as ordinary people.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“Remember, son, Mother-of-Glory says, compensating with pomposity for her deficits of piety or affection. The only way to change the world is through intentional, directed violence.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera

“The Perfect and Kind shrugs. His eyes are on me, not Fetter. He turns slowly to track my ever-freer passage in the thickening night. I circle at a distance outside the pyres, unwilling to be caught in their overlapping light. Afraid to get closer.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“How did you get this number?” Fetter asks. “I divined it in the entrails,” Mother-of-Glory says.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera

“Fetter smiles at this woman who was nearly a mother, entirely a stranger.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“The sea looks onto the backs of buildings, as if the entire city is turned away in a sulk.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“Systems are nothing to the systematic,”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors