Rachel Hartman, Shadow Scale
12 quotes
"How did you merit so much devotion so quickly?' I asked, making no attempt to keep the sarcasm from my voice.'I show them Heaven', said she, without a trace of irony. 'People are so desperate for light'."
"The beauty of the place moved me; I loved how the clean air felt in my lungs, how far I was from everything I had ever known. People I'd hurt, people I'd failed, people who thought me a monster. Here there was no monster greater than the ragged mountains."
"I took a break, stretched, tried again, failed, kicked over the music stand (I am not proud of that), and wonder whether I had reached the limits of my musical ability. Maybe I'd never had any. Surely someone with a modicum of talent wouldn't have to work this hard."
"I understood something about myself as well, even if I didn't have the will to examine it just then."
"My companions ate the bear. I found I had no appetite."
"Here there was no monster greater than the ragged mountains."
"So if the Infernum is an empy interior, what's Heaven in their conception?" I asked, nudging him."A second inside-out house, inside, or rather 'outside' the first," he said. "If you cross its threshold, you realize our world, for all its wonder, has been but a shdow, another kind of empitness. Heaven is more than this."
"Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that's like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can come to genuinely moral conclusions by our own paths."
"Was it probably true that reasoning beings were equal? It seemed more like a belief than a fact, even if I agreed with it. If you followed logic all the way back to its origin, did you inevitably end up at point of illogic, an article of faith?"
"Camba had bent her long neck down to Ingar's level and was muttering in his ear. "Do you feel the breeze on your face?" I heard her say. "That's yours, and worth feeling. Look at those orange clouds. All the trials of a day may be endured if you know there's such a sky at the end of it. Some days I told my heart to wait, just wait, because the sunset would teach me again that my pain was nothing compared with the eternal, circling sky."
"I smiled into the darkness. There was nothing "just" about metaphors, I was beginning to think; they followed me everywhere, illuminating and failing and illuminating again."
"The Ninysh might have resisted a bit harder. I don't mean to imply that they were cowards...," Maurizio said shrugging, clearly implying that the Ninysh were cowards."