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The Monster Baru Cormorant
Seth Dickinson
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.”
“She accepts the world as it is and the world accepts her thus. She is not mastered. What is done to her cannot confine what she will do.”
“The world is made of stories, which bind us all together, and impossible stories are the best of all, for they bind us in impossible ways.”
“Honor,” Apparitor murmured, “is just a credit rating for violence.”
“No living thing ever defeated Tain Hu in battle. Only the tide could fight her. Only the moon and the sea together could bring her down.”
“I’ll never know anyone’s true self, will I? Their thoughts and memories, the selfness 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. We all force our true selves into little hashes and show them like passwords. A smile is a hashing function, and a word, and a cry. The cry is not the grief, the word is not the meaning, the smile is not the joy: we cannot run the hash in reverse, we cannot get from the sign to the absolute truth. Maybe the smile is false. Maybe the grief is a lie.”
“Your power is secret, and in secret it is total. But to use your power you must touch the world. To touch you must be touched, to be touched is to be seen, to be seen is to be known. To be known is to perish. Act subtly, lest you diminish.”
“When things break underfoot, you know that you are going forward.”
“Tain Shir walks the deck of RNS Sulane between the bombs and incendiaries and steel-tipped barbs. A weapon among weapons but she alone is free. The tragedy of the knife is the hilt. The tragedy of the crossbow is the trigger. Shir has neither. She cannot be gripped nor fired. She is unmastered. The sailors are rude with her. So be it. Etiquitte is the domain of those whose power is conditional upon the respect of others, and Shir is unconditional. If she drifted alone in the void beyond the moon or if she walked among the monarchs of the ancient Cheetah Palaces she would not be altered in her capabilities or her intentions, for not one truth of her resides within a relationship to any other thing.”
“She chose when and where she would die. She chose the meaning of her death, and she chose the method. Rare is that gift, isn’t it? Rare is the choice to write the end of your own story.”
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Book Keywords:
love, ruin, cold, relationships, blood, battle, moon, perish, willpower, sea, name, vendetta, vengeance, war, known, fight, power, world, soldier, secrets, tide, paint, unbending, seen, history, sailor, life, masterless, stories, politics, strong, subtlety, color, warrior, unyielding, weapon, revenge, strength