Mari > Mari's Quotes

“Camilla and Palamedes were loved by Nona, said Paul. Pyrrha was loved by Nona. It’s finished, it’s done. You can’t take loved away.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

“Being able to see; being able to hold a book; being able to turn its page; being able to maintain a reading posture; being able to go to a bookshop to buy a book - I loathed the exclusionary machismo of book culture that demanded that its participants meet these five criteria of able-bodiedness. I loathed, too, the ignorant arrogance of all those self-professed book-lovers so oblivious to their privilege.”
― Saou Ichikawa, Hunchback

“Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Embrace diversity.
Unite—
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Yes, people had always been evil nearly as much as they had been good. Yes, happiness was rarer than suffering - that was simply a fact of mathematics; happiness required a narrow range of conditions, and suffering flourished in all the rest.
But Falcrest was not an innocent victim of a historical inevitability. Empire required a will, a brain to move the beast, to reach out with an appetite, to see other people as the answer to that appetite, to justify the devouring of other peoples as right and necessary and good, to frame slavery and conquest as acts of grace and charity.
Incrasticism had provided that last and most fateful technology. The capability to justify any violence in the name of an ultimate destiny, an engine to inflict misery and to claim that misery as necessary in the quest for utopia. A false science by which the races and sexes could be separated and specialized like workers in a mill. And the endless self-deceptive blind guilty quest to justify that false science, so that the suffering and the misery remained necessary.
Falcrest had chosen empire.
Falcrest could therefore be held responsible for its choice.
Not all those who lived in Falcrest participated in its devourings. But all those who lived in Falcrest had benefited from them, and by encouragement or by passive acceptance they had allowed those devourings to continue.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Empire planted that killing tree on Kyprananoke, where the rebels dashed children dead against the trunk.
The only answer to empire is to move the tree.
It is not justice. But there is no such thing as justice. Only the measureless and asymbolic truth. Who prospers. Who suffers. Who lives in glory. Who dies in chains.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“You will know your ruin well. You will put yourself into it as you have put yourself into us, thinking that it is your will. But it is your doom that moves you thus. And your flesh will be filled with ruin, as you have come to bring ruin into us.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Monsters can be charming, when they know you’re watching. They have a magnetism about them.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“You cannot destroy the masters by mastering them. You destroy them by destroying.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Power can't be separated from its history. A choice can't be taken in isolation from its context. Power is the ability to set the terns of the riddle. To arrange the rewards and punishments for which the choice is judged.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“A cultural misconception sustained by lurid rumor? In our great republic?”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Baru felt a profound empathy for her attacker. Falcrest has cut your people, cut off lips and balls and fingers and tongues, and you cannot get justice. You cannot wait for history to turn in your favor.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“I’m not the kind of immortal who never dies, Baru. Just the kind who lives forever.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“The power was in the Throne behind the throne.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I was not a lovable child, and I'd grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with fangs.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“My whole life, yes. Yes, forever, yes. Life is too short and love is too long.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth