jordanliketheriver’s Reviews > The Slantwise Histories: Collected Stories > Status Update

“This, too, is the way of the world: There are rules a Gentleman doesn’t break, lines he doesn’t cross, until he does, because it is profitable to do so.”

“He wasn’t greedy, not really. He only wanted enough money so it would never run out. And he wasn’t heartless, either! He only left his heart ashore, where it wouldn’t bother him so much.”

“I, too, had been angry. I, too, had wanted to bully the world into better behavior. But it isn’t the world that changes when you throw yourself against it.”

“I am no berserker; I have never fought for fury or bloodlust. But for the first time, I imagine how it would feel. To unhitch my reason, to unleash the terrible animal of my body, which has spent centuries learning nothing but violence.”

Fuuuuuuck man.

I have made my life a work of bloody alchemy, transforming a child into a devil into a saint, a kingdom into an empire, a prince into a God. That I have lived and killed, and lived again in the name of a man who does not deserve it because I wanted so badly to be beloved.”

“The taste of asphalt and oil filled my mouth, a dead world on my tongue.”

“I was raised in the church, wasn’t I? That’s how a believer proves his love: blindly, on his knees.”

“I decided I would find the answer, no matter the cost. I was a knight, wasn’t I? That’s how a knight proves his love: on a pile of corpses.”

“But she’d been willing to kill for me, and so she must have loved me, after all. As I loved May, as Sir John loved his wife, as God loved the world: with blood on our hands.”

“Finch always said there were certain places where it was easier to tell stories, and to hear them: around a fire at night, in the mist at dawn, on a porch at dusk. In-between places, balanced on the border between familiar and strange.”

“I still keep a pack beneath my bed, just in case…Everything I need to survive. May knew what I was; she’d found my pack when we were kids. Shed only asked if I would take her with me when I ran. And I said yes—easily, honestly—because by then she had become one of the things I needed to survive.”