Rylan Shewmaker > Recent Status Updates

“You rely invariable on authority or on the past, and never on yourselves.”

“No, I did not promise to go. I only smirked, and bowed, and said the word ‘happy.’”

What is this Odium’s champion nonsense

Weird as hell but getting more bearable!!

Okay but like why and how has Kaladin suddenly acquired a degree in psychology between this book and the previous…

I kinda hate the description of “zooming in” on a map in this book. It feels like such a weird anachronistic word

Anna Karenina mentioned!!

“I was in the slipstream of his status as a firebrand.”

“Erase family names, erase nations — I was taught such things by the desert.”

“…continuing with the song her mother had taught her, that she practiced on any surface. A kitchen table, a wall while she walked upstairs, her own bed before she fell asleep. They had no piano.”

“These are permanent winds, which live in the present tense.”

Reading YA in French let’s goooo

This book is really good and I wish I’d read it before going to Croatia / while there. Zagreb takes on a different light

“One who preferred her own sorrows to all the joys in the world.”

The backstory Sanderson gives Dalinar is actually insane

Kaplan really needs to read Edward Said’s writing on Orientalism, bc he says some crazy things in this book.

Currently on my Robert Kaplan pilgrimage of Zagreb… Belgrade up soon

Lots of criticism of this book, and I can understand why! But I’m learning lots and loving the writing style.

“‘You must have patience, young man. It is a long story.’ I will shorten it.”

Ugh poor kaladin😭

I’m re-reading this series before I read the new 5th book (also bc I need some juicy audiobooks and a distraction) and wow I really didn’t notice the first time the extent to which so much of Sanderson’s prose is like reading a video game description. “The translucence was one of the most wonderful parts of shard plate” like okay random exposition in action scene

“…on the principle of it being very un-genteel to be curious…”

Agonizing stuff

Exactly the silly sort of book I was looking for

“Am I doing the right thing by telling stories? …As it is I’m taking on the role of midwife, or of the tender of a garden whose only merit is at best sowing seeds and later to fight tediously against weeds.”

“I might be an old man before I’m a man at all. I might be dead before.”

“The crowd, no doubt, rushed home to see themselves on television, and what they saw went out all over the world — unchallenged by the other things I knew were there.”

Josefine Soliman’s First Letter to Francis I, Emperor of Austria… oh my god

“A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.”

“You can’t go home again, because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.”

“I found myself not saying, but feeling, ‘goodbye.’ Not farewell. Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Goodbye is short and final, a word with teeth; sharp, to bite through the string that connects past with future.”