Jasmaine Moore

“All worlds are open to us. If we are bold enough to enter.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent

“This work can never satisfy, Din, for it can never finish. The dead cannot be restored. Vice and bribery will never be totally banished from the cantons. And the drop of corruption that lies within every society shall always persist. The duty of the ludex is not to boldly vanquish it but to manage it. We keep the stain from spreading, yes, but it is never gone. Yet this job is perhaps the most important in all the Iyalets, for without it, well… the Empire would come to look much like Yarrow, where the powerful and the cruel prevail without check. And tell me - does that realm look capable of fighting off a leviathan?”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption

“The second decade of the twenty-first century seems replete with examples as to why autocracies are, to put it mildly, very stupid. Our headlines are dominated by regimes with one nigh-all-powerful man at the top making any number of terrible choices, and then – to the bafflement of the entire globe – doubling down on them, thus inflicting massive suffering on his people. It seems the talents that make a man capable of navigating palace intrigue until he wins the throne generally don’t coexist with the talents required for – or even a passing interest in – good governance. P 459
Yet if the 2010’s awed us with the power of autocrats, the 2020’s seem hell-bent to refute it. More and more, it becomes impossible to deny that autocrats – like any ruler – are but men, yet men with no obligation to listen their people, and thus acknowledge reality. This, in turn, makes them fools: fools that are very difficult to dislodge from their thrones, true, but fools nonetheless. P 460”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption

“Stories exist in all worlds. They are immutable. Like gold.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent