quotes

sideblog to save quotes of books i read

[wordsoficeandfire]

It is too depressing, too soul-crushingly sad, to reminisce. The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.

Ling Ma, Severance

[wordsoficeandfire]

The future is more exponentially exploding rents. The future is more exponentially exploding rents. The future is more condo buildings, more luxury housing bought by shell companies of the global wealthy elite. The future is more Whole Foods, aisles of refrigerated cut fruit packaged in plastic containers. The future is more Urban Outfitters, more Sephoras, more Chipotles. The future just wants more consumers. The future is more newly arrived college grads and tourists in some fruitless search for authenticity. The future is more overpriced Pabsts at divebar simulacrums.

Ling Ma, Severance

[wordsoficeandfire]

At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population had abandoned the rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration.

Carl Sagan, Contact

[serratedpens]

Mag Gabbert, "Another Theory About Love"

[wordsoficeandfire]

The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, "Songs of the Open Road"

[wordsoficeandfire]

The young man at the cash register noticed me and then didn’t take his eyes off of me. I was in a white nightgownish dress, thin as smoke. He was picking a pimple on his chin and staring at me. There are hundreds of such small rapes a day.

Lisa Taddeo, Animal

[wordsoficeandfire]

I'll never know anyone's true self, will I? Their thoughts and memories, the selfishness of someone, the me-ness of me: that's like a true name, a person in all their formless awesome grandeur. But we do not see that grandeur. We see each other only in the shapes we are forced to assume. Words constrain us, and also our laws, and our fears and hopes, and the wind, and the rain, and the dog that barks while we're trying to speak, all these things constrain us.

Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant

[wordsoficeandfire]

Of such things are the destinies of empires made. Not of armies or great notions or the glitter of wealth, but the most delicate motions of our hearts.

Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant

[wordsoficeandfire]

I used to wonder if you were a monster. Now I know the answer. If you want power in this world, power enough to change it, it seems you have to be.

Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

[wordsoficeandfire]

Without any outward sign or motion, in the wreckage of herself, she donned her armor, made it firm around her heart. Raise her mask: a cold discipline, a steel beneath her skin. Grow comfortable, she told herself. It will never come off.

Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

[wordsoficeandfire]

Good-bye, she thinks. Good-bye, kuye lam. I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.

Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

[wordsoficeandfire]

Every moment is an edict spoken by its past. The past is the real tyranny.

Seth Dicksinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

[wordsoficeandfire]

None of it could be reduced to something as simple as invader and invaded. Baru saw in the city what she felt in herself. The two-faced allegiances, the fearful monitoring of self and surroundings, the whimpering need to please somehow kneeling alongside marrow-deep defiance. One eye set on a future of glittering wealthy subservience, the other turned to a receding and irretrievable freedom. The liquor of empire, alluring and corrosive at once, saturating everything, every old division of sex and race and history, remaking it all with the promise and the threat of power.

Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

[wordsoficeandfire]

Her fury had nothing else to eat so it began to eat her.

Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

[wordsoficeandfire]

Freedom granted by your rulers is just a chain with a little slack.

Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

[wordsoficeandfire]

In time the things you've done become too large to carry with you. So you set them down, And you think that you are free. But then you look back and see that someone else carries your burden now: you see that you have dropped your weight upon those who stood behind you.

Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant

[wordsoficeandfire]

This is the truth. You will know because it hurts.

Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant