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403 pages, Hardcover
First published March 12, 2019
“The real struggle on this earth is not between those who want peace and those who want war. It’s between those who want peace and those who want justice. If justice is what you want, then you may often be right, but you will rarely be happy.”
“These treaties are made for polities, not people. Lives are ground up beneath the wheels of peace.”
“Nothing is so frightening or evil that it doesn’t come from the same thing that made the stars.”
She could not envision a God who demanded such particularity of belief, whose mercy and forgiveness were confined to such a precise segment of humankind. Nor, if it came to that, could she fathom hell, which seemed a somewhat contradictory place: you could be sent there for behaving in the right way but believing in the wrong God, or for believing in the right God but behaving in the wrong way. And that, in turn, threw heaven into disarray, since those who both believed and behaved rightly were invited to indulge in the very pleasures for which those who behaved wrongly had been sent to hell.
“The real struggle on this earth is not between those who want peace and those who want war. It’s between those who want peace and those who want justice. If justice is what you want, then you may often be right, but you will rarely be happy.”
“If I were a man, you’d call me a hero. Instead, you want to argue with me because I’ve reversed the order in which honor demands we must die.”
“Once a story leaves the hands of its author, it belongs to the reader. And the reader may see any number of things, conflicting things, contradictory things. The author goes silent. If what he intended mattered so very much, there would be no need for inquisitions and schisms and wars. But he is silent, silent. The author of the poem is silent, the author of the world is silent. We are left with no intentions but our own.”
”Long ago, all the birds of the world began to forget their history and their language because they had been leaderless for so long. So a brave few sought out the king of the birds, a king in hiding--the wisest and greatest of all kings, living on the island of Qaf in the Dark Sea beneath the shadow of a great mountain. Waiting for those with the courage to seek him.”
She was the last reminder of a time of prosperity, when pretty girls could be had from Italian slave merchants for unearthly sums; there had been no money and no victories since.
”She’s very clever, this Queen Isabella of Spain--or if she isn’t, there are very clever people advising her. I assumed the general was their hawk--that they went their military man to bully our military men. But they know us better than we know ourselves, it seems. They know my son does not love his viziers or his generals. The people he loves are here, in the harem. They sent their dove to the men. The hawk, they have sent to us.”
"As I've told you, no one living has ever set foot on that island. It's a story they tell in church to seagoing people who need to believe there's something left once they've lost sight of land."
If you run from this thing, you’ll set it loose. It will lodge in your bloodstream like a splinter and you’ll carry it all your days. It’s too big for that, thought Fatima, half to herself. It’s small said the dog-man. It’s very small. It began as a mote in the eye of the Deceiver. Keep your back straight and don’t look away.
”You’re always so angry,” he said. “I don’t understand. You have pretty clothes, entertainments, food when others go hungry. You have the love of a sultan. What else could you possibly want?” Fatima licked the dry, taut line of her lips.
“To be sultan,” she said.
"This isn't the end of the world, little Fatima," he said in a voice that was almost kind. "It's only the end of the world you know."
—Vikram, p.147
"Fear doesn't need to make sense in order to have consequences."
—Vikram, p.102
"If justice is what you want, then you may often be right, but you will rarely be happy."
—Lady Aisha, p.104
"Yes, you were taught to waste your anger. It's convenient for girls to be angry about nothing. Girls who are angry about something are dangerous. If you want to live, you must learn to use your anger for your own benefit, not the benefit of those who would turn it against you."
"I don't know how."
"You've already begun."
—p.178