Home > Work > The Burning God (The Poppy War, #3)
1 " Then why did you do it?" she asked."To protect you," he said. "To protect everyone around me. I'm sorry I couldn't think of a better way how."She had no response to that. His words terrified her. If Jiang had seen this hell as the best of alternatives, then what had he been afraid of?"I'm sorry, child," Jiang stretched out his hands in a conciliatory gesture. "I am so sorry. "
― R.F. Kuang , The Burning God (The Poppy War, #3)
2 " Darling, people pay you less attention when you don't leave a trail of bodies in your wake. "
3 " Don't think about absolutes, think about the details. Every day, every hour that you can maintain an information asymmetry, you do it. "
4 " But as she and Rin had both discovered, the battles were easy. Destroying was easy. The hard part was the aftermath. "
5 " Amateurs obsessed over strategy, and professionals obsessed over logistics. "
6 " It was a funny thing, how fear made him look so much younger, how it rounded his eyes and erased the cruel grimace of his sneer so that he looked, just for an instant, like the boy she'd first met at Sinegard. "
7 " Words belonging to a legacy that now, she knew, she had no choice but to face. “Because we’ll be Cike. And the first rule of the Cike is that we cull. "
8 " Theirs was a bond forged from necessity, hurt, and a shared, intimate understanding of hell. "
9 " You love your shamans like your own family, and a knife twists in your heart every time you watch one of them die. But you have to do it. You've got to make the choices no one else can. It's death or the Chuluu Korikh. Commanders cull. "
10 " Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you. "
11 " Take what you want. I’ll hate you for it. But I’ll love you forever. I can’t help but love you. "
12 " Oh, but history moved in such vicious circles. "
13 " You can’t do this for me,” he said. “I won’t let you.” “It’s not for you. It’s not a favor. It’s the cruelest thing I could do. "
14 " She was a goddess. She was a monster. She‘d nearly destroyed this country. And then she‘d given it one last, gasping chance to live. "
15 " The point of revenge wasn’t to heal. The point was that the exhilaration, however temporary, drowned out the hurt. "
16 " You don't fix hurts by pretending they never happened. You treat them like infected wounds. You dig deep with a burning knife and gouge out the rotten flesh and then, maybe, you have a chance to heal. "
17 " I am the force of creation, I amthe end and the beginning. The world is a painting and I hold the brush. Iam a god. "
18 " Dying was easy. Living was so much harder—that was the most important lesson Altan had ever taught her. "
19 " She saw it in a flash of utter clarity. She knew what she had to do. The only path, the only way forward. And what a familiar path it was. It was so obvious now. The world was a dream of the gods, and the gods dreamed in sequences, in symmetry, in patterns. History repeated itself, and she was only the latest iteration of the same scene in a tapestry that had been spun long before her birth. "
20 " It doesn’t go away. It never will. But when it hurts, lean into it. It’s so much harder to stay alive. That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to live. It means you’re brave. "
