«Город лестниц» kitabından alıntılar, sayfa 2

Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves.... Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.

She felt overwhelmed. It was--she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library--a lot like being in love for the first time.

There is no crueler hells then committee work....

You can be a girl at any age, you know. Girls at forty. Girls at fifty. There's a kind of flightiness to them, just like how a man at forty can have the impatience and belligerence of a five-year-old boy. But you can also be a woman at any age.

The gods are cruel not because they make us work. They are cruel because they allow us to hope.

..history, as you may know, is much like a spiral staircase that gives the illusion of going up, but never quite goes anywhere.

Forgetting... is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself... For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was & there was only ever a butterfly.

And Olvos said to them: “Why have you done this, my children? Why is the sky wreathed with smoke? Why have you made war in far places, and shed blood in strange lands?And they said to Her: “You blessed us as Your people, and we rejoiced, and were happy. But we found those who were not Your people, and they would not become Your people, and they were willful and ignorant of You. They would not open their ears to Your songs, or lay Your words upon their tongues. So we dashed them upon the rocks and threw down their houses and shed their blood and scattered them to the winds, and we were right to do so. For we are Your people. We carry Your blessings. We are Yours, and so we are right. Is this not what You said?”And Olvos was silent.

– Люди – такие странные существа, Шара Комайд… Они ценят наказание, потому что видят в нем признание важности своих действий – а значит, собственной важности. В конце концов – смысл наказывать за то, что не имеет никакого значения? Посмотри на колкастани: они реально считают, что мир существует единственно для того, чтобы вгонять их в краску, унижать, наказывать и испытывать! Все создано только ради них, родимых! Мир полон гадостей и боли, но все это исключительно ради того, чтобы они страдали! Так что Колкан всего лишь дал им то, чего они хотели.

...время всегда заставляет платить за ошибки. Даже если ошибаются… Божества.

Хороший историк держит прошлое в голове, а будущее – в сердце.