Цитаты из книги Бару Корморан, предательница

Одет он был столь изысканно, что Бару сочла его костюм свидетельством честности: вряд ли кому-то придёт в голову настолько открыто хвастать приверженностью к взяткам и коррупции.

Уверяю вас... ...всё это правда. Убедиться легко: правда причиняет боль.

Похоже, если стремишься к власти в этом мире - к власти, достаточной, чтобы изменить его, - быть монстром просто необходимо.

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

“That is how we greet a lady here.” Xate Yawa straightened to beam at Baru. “Ah, so fresh! So full of promise! Climbing docks in trousers—I remember having that fire.” “Jurispotence Xate, Your Excellence, I am honored,” Baru said, and marked the woman an enemy: her greeting had started at foreign, gone to woman, then young, and last of all to a reminder of what Xate had done.

While she had waited behind the walls of the school, her home had been conquered. The soldiers of the invasion, the paper money and the sailcloth, the pigpen diseases, had won. The old divisions of harborside and plainsmen exploited before she was even old enough to understand them.

And her mother’s answering disdain: Go, then. Learn all their secrets. Cover yourself in them. You will return with a steel mask instead of a face.

Ордвин никогда не был добр к тем князьям, которые расплачивались кровью за идеи. Ордвин привечал тех, кто платил кровью за власть.

Хочешь избежать лесного пожара - выжги сухостой. Нужна лишь подходящая искра.

"Men used to marry men," Tain Hu told her, as they crouched together over a fire pit to cook their venison. "And women once took wives. IT was done by the poor, the starving, the desperate, by those who needed a business pact or a shared roof. By soldiers on campaign with no one else to turn to. Mostly it was done by those without needs or troubles -- done for love. The words tribadist and sodomite, the things they mean and define, came later. Before those words there were only people."

She had always loved the stars. But in the desert of winter it was imposisble to forget that they were cold, and distant, and did not care.

Was it really slavery if the slave was grateful? If that gratitude had been hammered into the alloy of his being?

"Tell me what mistake I`ve made. Tell me why my authority has been hobbled." "Your tactics are self-centered. You have forgotten that you are not the only player on the board, that inherent talent speaks for no more than experience, and that others around you seek to expand their authority and constrain yours. Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent."

"The sword kills," Baru recited, trying to remember the Handbook of Manumission, its arguments for revolutionary zeal. "But the arm moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath to duty, and that duty moves the mind, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless."

We know how to help them best... and sometimes we have to help them a little less right now, so that we can help them a little more later.

Answer weakness with strength.