Laureen > Laureen's Quotes

“It is a privilege to do nothing, Max. So many people do not have that gift.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Children of Fallen Gods

“Maybe one day you’ll stand where I do. You’ll cut away every weakness. You’ll make every sacrifice. And then the world will look at you and sneer at your inhumanity, as if you didn’t just become everything they told you to be.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Children of Fallen Gods

“But isn’t having built something worth more than the fear of it being destroyed?”
― Carissa Broadbent, Children of Fallen Gods

“Men want power because it makes them feel good. Women want power because it lets us do things.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“My name is Tisaanah. I am a free woman and yet still a slave. I am fragments of many things but a whole of only myself. I am a daughter of no worlds, and all worlds.

And I am not done yet.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“I was too young to know the truth then. That victory meant another’s defeat, and sometimes our own defeat. That winning meant sacrifices, and sometimes ones that even our own people were not willing to make. That in war, someone always paid.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“Because if I allow myself to be angry, I will never stop.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“I had spent the night cutting myself up into little pieces for consumption, forcing people to acknowledge me, thrusting my pain into their faces.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“It's easy to die for someone," I said, "but it is so much more valuable to live. I do not give you permission to fail if I fail.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“I loved her for her strength, for her beautiful brute force, for seeing what no one else did. I loved her for everything the world constantly used against her. I loved her for continuing anyway.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“Many people do terrible things. But we can either eat our anger and make it fuel us or we can let it eat us alive.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“Once, many years ago, he had told me that his grandfather used to say that every moment in life was a coin with one dark side and one light. They fell on the ground with one side facing up, but the other always lay beneath it, there, but hidden. Serel always saw both sides of the coin, even when fate handed him nothing but darkness.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“I had forgotten that people could be that way. I had forgotten that someone, somewhere, was painting terrible pictures of their wife in a garden. I was so far gone that I didn't even remember that that kind of mundane contentment actually existed, least of all in the same moments as such terrible things.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“At least I was doing something, unlike Max, who seemed fairly committed to doing absolutely nothing, ever. On a particularly cold day, he stepped outside, shivered, looked up at the sky, and declared, “I’m not made for this,” before wandering back into the house. I quickly learned that Max was apparently only “made for” an exceptionally narrow set of environments, temperatures, activities, and interactions.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“I am a daughter of no worlds, and all worlds. And I am not done yet.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“To be reminded of everything I had already lost while looking into the eyes of everything I had left to lose.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“Once I’d thought that love was the sum of its parts, the result of a collection of traits and experiences, like a structure steadily built from bricks layered over bricks. If you collect enough of them, there is love. But that had been a child’s view of the world. The bricks were important, but what they created was more than just a pile of stones. It was the difference between a house and a home. If the building burns down, something is still there that makes it home.
If the memories are gone, something is still there that makes it love.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Mother of Death & Dawn

“You are going to die. But do not fear death. Death is a door, and though none of us can follow you through it today, you will cross its threshold knowing that the mark you have left behind will be a worthy one. This is not an end.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Mother of Death & Dawn

“A realization came to me, one that I had been grappling with for the last ten years. There was no single moment when everything changed. No single before and after. There was just… life. A million decisions and a million consequences.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Mother of Death & Dawn

“I love you did not say enough. I love you did not say, thank you for being my home. I love you did not say, thank you for being my future.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Mother of Death & Dawn

“We all feel the same things, and we will still die trying to kill each other for it.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Mother of Death & Dawn

“It’s not all that hard to keep yourself sane, so long as you’re flexible with your definition of the term.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Mother of Death & Dawn

“When Max believes in something, he gives it his whole self. It’s his greatest strength and greatest weakness. And you, Tisaanah, were the first thing he had believed in for a long, long time. It takes more than four walls to break that kind of faith.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Mother of Death & Dawn

“The past was jagged glass. But I was drunk on the way it tore me up.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Mother of Death & Dawn

“Words. Such infuriatingly clumsy tools to communicate such important things.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Mother of Death & Dawn

“Your people have never been more in need of someone to believe in."
"The mere idea of that someone being me makes me a little ill."
"It may seem unkind to say this, Max, but the way it makes you feel is perhaps the least important thing right now."
A petulant part of me wanted to argue with her. But she gave me a deadpan stare that cut off my unspoken retort with, I escaped slavery, killed my master, forced a foreign country to take me seriously, traded away my autonomy, led a revolution, overthrew an empire, and then followed you back to your stupid broken country to support you only for you to whine about how you don’t “feel” like you can do this?”
― Carissa Broadbent, Mother of Death & Dawn

“Sometimes there was nothing to do but put one foot in front of the other.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Mother of Death & Dawn

“I have warned you, if something happens to you, I will personally raze the Eternal Flame. That isn't a threat. It is a promise. Consider your survival as much as necessity to the Resistance as Holdfast's. If you die, I will kill every single one of them.”
― SenLinYu, Alchemised

“She was a non-active member of the Order of the Eternal Flame and did not fight.”
― SenLinYu, Alchemised

“Being alive is not the same as living. I hope someday you'll have a chance to realise the difference.”
― SenLinYu, Alchemised