Quote The Raven

Great library of quotes. Writing Blog: https://tired-tales.tumblr.com/ Main Account: https://kvothbloodless.tumblr.com/

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

"If you do not feel up to the challenge, Xical, you may withdraw from the delve,” she said. “And if you need help making that decision, I will provide it.”

“That’d be a shame,” Tupoc idly said, drawing his pistol and leaning it against his shoulder. “Why, then I wouldn’t be under truce and in my sorrow I might just go mad and, say, shoot one of the delvers in the stomach out of grief.”

He stopped to wink at Tall Bibek, of all people, and when he turned back Cao’s way his smile was wide. A ripple of unease went through the crowd. They’d been around Tupoc long enough to believe he would pull that trigger, as well they should.

“Aren’t we all pleased that I’m under truce, and that only a fool would try to change that?”

“You think you can strong-arm me?” Chunhua Cao frostily said.

“Yes,” Tupoc easily replied. “After seeing you employ the method so much, I’ve taken a shine to it. It’s been quite instructive, seeing you wave that stick and carrot to move us to spend our lives for your little half-baked coup.”

There was something in Tupoc Xical’s eyes, then, that was hard as stone.

“It’s been most edifying, seeing you ride those oaths like a horse,” Tupoc softly said. “Casting aside everything the cloak is meant to stand for so you might piss on it from a slightly higher seat. I’ll not soon be forgetting that lesson, Colonel Cao.”

Tupoc had not stuck by Song this long purely for love of mayhem. He might be half a monster, but he believed in the Watch, what it stood for. And he did not care for what Chunhua Cao was up to, the spending of blackcloak lives for her personal ambitions.

There was a reason Song had been confident he wouldn’t pull the rug on her today.

“Relying on outside help would disqualify you from the yearly test exemption,” Colonel Cao flatly informed him.

Tupoc laughed in her face.

“Another stick, invented on the spot?” he mocked. “I care not, colonel.”

He shrugged.

“I never intended to take that out in the first place,” he said. “Why would I want to lose out on a chance to take up a contract, stretch my legs out in the world?”

Her gaze went past him, to the delving crew.

“I imagine your cabalists-”

“Then they will leave, and I will replace them,” Tupoc interrupted with a shrug. “There is nothing that you can offer me or take from me that I value, colonel. The delve is my reward. The rest is carrots for those horses that forgot they enrolled to put on the harness.”

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

"That’s how I know you won’t hurt me. You’re like me. You’re dangerous, and violent, and you’ll screw it all up and lash out eventually, and you might injure me, but you can’t hurt me.” Keeka’s claws scratched along his chitin bands, blunted tips failing to find purchase. “You gave up everything to risk being here. I understand.”

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

“Stars don’t feel. You never did either; not until this. You’re not in the unfeeling heavens anymore, poor girl.” It was hard to be sure, but Ms. Cross’s eyes seemed softer. “You’re trapped down here with us. That’s what you don’t see. Naomi? She’s already changed you.”

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

“Fine words, coming from a Coyac,” Tupoc idly said. “How many hundreds of serfs did your father bring back from Sordon to work in mines and fields?

“One was too many,” Izel bluntly replied.

“Spoken,” Tupoc Xical said, “by a man raised in the light of candles, fed on bread come of servile wheat fields, clothed in robes of cotton picked by their hands and whose tutors were paid with foreign treasures. What is left of you, without the flowers? Not much that I can see.”

Tupoc had spoken the way he always spoke: a bullfighter, twirling his cape to draw the eye before he sank barbs into flesh. Tristan could see it in those pale eyes, the expectation of the twitch and roar. That the other man would lower his horns and charge, that the familiar old game would play out down in the sand. Only Izel looked into Tupoc’s eyes as well, and whatever it was he found there caused in him no anger.

That look on Izel Coyac’s face, the thief thought, looked terribly like grief.

“You were Leopard Society,” he said.

Something like unease flickered on Tupoc Xical’s face, but it passed.

“No such society exists,” Tupoc grinned, a slice of ivory and mockery. “Careful, Coyac, you’ll say too much where the foreigners might hear. What would your father think?”

“I do not care,” Izel said, and pushed back his seat to rise to his feet.

The grin turned expecting, almost eager – he leaned forward a bit and angled his chin to make the punch easier. Only the other Izcalli instead did something that wiped the smile right off his face.

He bowed.

Low, deep. Starkly enough it could not be mistaken for anything else. He straightened only after a long moment of utter silence had passed.

“I’m sorry,” Izel said.

“Pardon?” Tupoc mildly said.

The Izcalli’s perfectly even face looked like a ceramic mask, a solid thing only cousin to a man’s face.

“I am sorry,” Izel Coyac repeated, “for what we did to you, Tupoc Xical. For all that was stolen.”

“Soft-handed noble,” Tupoc smiled. “Nothing was stolen. I was given a gift.”

“We stole that too,” Izel gently said. “The ability to understand that what was done to you is evil. Fundamentally, inexcusably. That all who hold a stake in the rule of Izcalli have failed a thousand thousand children like you, and still do. That we ordered you snatched up in the night, raised to kill and die nameless, so that we might keep repeating the same old mistakes instead of learning.”

And it should have sounded pretentious, Tristan thought, or sanctimonious. A man raising himself up by apologizing. It would have, if not for the devastating weight of that sincerity. Izel meant every word, the thief thought, meant them completely. It was so painfully obvious that not even Tupoc was able to laugh him off and gods did he look like he wanted to

“I am sorry,” Izel Coyac said one last time, “that we taught you it was necessary, what they ordered you do to, because it isn’t. We can be better.”

His jaw locked.

“It’s just easier not to be.”

Tristan had seen Tupoc Xical afraid before. For all that the Izcalli was like a great cat, all death and shamelessness, he was not beyond flinching. It was not always all in his hands and when Ocotlan had dropped dead at the table next to him he’d been afraid. Almost fled. But there was a difference, the thief thought, between fear and being rattled. Ocotlan’s death had made him afraid, but it had not rattled him.

He looked rattled now.

Like someone had snatched the fire and the poison right out of him. And as Tupoc swallowed, answer shying from his lip, the Izcalli felt the gazes of all those around him staring at a naked part of who he was – and reacted the only way that came to him in that moment.

He drew his knife, lunging across the table.

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

The minstrel looked into Fate's bottomless eyes, and knew that if you played dice with Fate the roll was always fixed.

You could have heard a sparrow fall.

‘Yeah,’ said Cohen, at last. ‘Why not?’

Fate tossed the die on to the board. ‘Six,’ he said, without breaking eye contact.

‘Right,’ said Cohen. ‘So I've got to a get a six too, yeah?’

Fate smiled. ‘Oh, no. You are, after all, a god. And gods play to win. You, O mighty one, must throw a seven.’

‘Seven?’ said the minstrel.

‘I fail to see why this should present a difficulty,’ said Fate, ‘to one entitled to be here.’

Cohen turned the die over and over. It had the regulation six sides.

‘I could see that could present a difficulty,’ he said, ‘but only for mortals, o' course.’ He tossed the die up in the air once or twice. ‘Seven?’ he said.

‘Seven,’ said Fate.

‘Could be a knotty one,’ said Cohen.

The minstrel stared at him, and felt a shiver run down his spine.

‘You'll remember I said that, lad?’ Cohen added.

‘So… seven and I win,’ said Cohen. ‘It comes down showin' seven and I win, right?’

‘Yes. Of course,’ said Fate.

‘Sounds like a million-to-one chance to me,’ said Cohen.

He tossed the die high in the air, and it slowed as it rose, tumbling glacially with a noise like the swish of windmill blades.

It reached the top of its arc and began to fall.

Cohen was staring fixedly at it, absolutely still. Then his sword was out of its scabbard and it whirled around in a complex curve. There was a snick and a green flash in the middle of the air and…

…two halves of an ivory cube bounced across the table.

One landed showing the six. The other landed showing the one

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

“Young lady. The devil’s rates have never changed: everything you have, for everything you want. It’s the fairest bargain there is, and anyone who says otherwise either expected to be able to cheat or never understood the deal to begin with.”

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

I've never done this before. Never. I do not speak what I'm really thinking if at all possible, and even in the brief moments I lose control it isn't anywhere close to everything. There is always part of me filtering it out, judging whether or not it's acceptable to talk about this or that, and almost always deciding no. No, of course it's not acceptable. Why would it ever be? That's the conclusion, over and over again. No one will want to know. Not even my closest friends, because the only reason they can stand to be friends with me at all is because I keep all of that to myself.

But Blossom isn't asking to be my friend. The council isn't asking to be my friend. They are asking to be me. To know everything about me so intimately that we are as one. And that comes with all the baggage, too. It comes with all the scars. I will always have my scars.

I inhale, and let out the deepest breath of my entire life.

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

I'm not. I'm really not. I'm not good at self-control, I'm just good at acting based on habits, habits that I formed as a maladaptive survival mechanism against abusive foster families that didn't want to deal with a fucking cripple. And I tricked myself into taking pride in that garbage because I had to have something, I had to take the victories I earned no matter how bad for me they might have been in the long run. I'm not an expert social manipulator, I'm a mass of overgrown scars twisting the folds of my mind to be good at dealing with awful people, good at giving them what they want so they leave me alone and don't hurt me, don't hate me, don't wish I was someone else's problem. And now that I'm out of my element, that expert competence is crumbling like the paper mache wall it really is.

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

People are so annoying. They’ve always been annoying, and it’s gotten even worse since I gained powers. I might have plenty of experience being treated like a freak but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t wear on me. It’s always, always, always about making everyone else feel better, about not drawing attention to all the ways my existence makes them feel bad, about ensuring no one has to acknowledge the poor disabled kid and suffer the horrible consequences of having to look at me. How awful it is for everyone else that my skin is a revolting mess of scar tissue. How terrible for the rest of the world that I’m not fucking pretty!

Always, always, always, hold back for everyone else’s sake. Grin and bear it, never call them out on their hypocrisy, never demand that I stop being forced to shoulder the burdens that they should be lifting off of me. But not anymore. Not today. Today I use everything. Today is finally about efficient, brutal, optimal violence. And no one will even have to suffer the indignity of looking at me when I’m hidden away in the smoke.

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

"I think," I answer softly, "that I am going to walk up these stairs and kill so many people that they're going to carve the names onto a rock in Washington D.C."

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

"Every night I've prayed for a miracle," he says quietly. "What are you, if not that?"

I resist the urge to scowl and only halfway succeed.

"I'm not so sure the Goddess grants prayers, kid," I tell him.

"That's okay," he answers. "I wasn't praying to a goddess. Do it."

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

"Kagiso I fucking killed everyone!" she snaps. "Are you stupid? Why the fuck are you still standing here?"

"Didn't kill everyone," Kagiso answers, pointing at her. "One friend left."

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

Ah, of course. He's right, I'm being stupid, getting paranoid and thinking about terrible situations for no good reason.

Of course I trust him, I think to myself. He's my friend.

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

She finds the page she’s looking for and turns the book around, kneeling before me. One page is a full-color plate of a sleeping girl with skin the color of chewed gum and seven small men gathered around her. The other page is dense text with a title in curlicued faux-Victorian font: Little Snow-White.

“You were right, of course,” the queen says, conversationally. “I am the villain, the stepmother, the wicked witch, the evil queen.” Her face is racked with furious grief, lips twisting with something far too dark to be humor. She leans past me, so close I can feel the heat of her cheekbone against mine, the slight stirring of my hair as she whispers, “I don’t have a name.”

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

WHAT IS THE CORRECT LEVEL OF INJUSTICE AT WHICH TO DECLARE YOURSELF IN REBELLION AGAINST THE POWER METING OUT JUDGMENT IN THE UNIVERSE?

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

The most pressing infelicity in the arrangement of material concerns the distribution of bone, muscle, keratin, etc. A cursory examination of the material environment will allow you to verify that these material are not distributed homogeneously and are almost entirely found at ground level, usually within a set of designated "dwellings" (houses, etc.) A moment of honest introspection should reveal the incorrectness of this arrangement. There are cases in which is is in fact correct for bone, muscle, keratin, etc. to be located at ground level and within "dwellings," but for it to be thus distributed in every case is much too far. It will be difficult to rectify this injustice on a wider scale, but immediate improvements may be improvised: I suggest for instance moving oneself and one's fellows as far above sea level as possible, and vacating "dwellings."

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

The task is never done. No one else can shoulder it for us. The task cannot be theorized into parts such as desire or satisfaction. Instead it presents itself in a complete bolus of absolute responsibility. Each moment we have the choice: perform the duty, or evade the duty. Society as it has existed for millennia is a set of structures mainly aimed at rationalizing the second of these choices. Mundum says: DO. And we may either do or not do. And all the theories, all the structures, all the kings and all the ballot booths, are ways of saying, "but perhaps we can choose not to do." No.