Home > Work > The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2) QUOTES

The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2) QUOTES

1 " I am Abdumasi of the House of Abd, master of ships, champion cat gambler, and I challenge you to mortal up-fuckery! "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

2 " There are families here, Baru.” There are families everywhere, Baru thought. That has never stopped anyone: except the people who lose. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

3 " 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. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

4 " 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. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

5 " 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. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

6 " 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. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

7 " I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

8 " Do not do her work for her. Do not build her up in your mind. She's only one woman. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

9 " Mother Tahr *had* written a letter to Tau-indi, explaining that she had to go away for a while. But she'd sent the letter to Padrigan to deliver, and he'd put off reading it. For as long as it was unopened, you see, it might still be a love note.

Of such things, the Whale Words tell us, are the destinies of empires made. Not of armies or great notions or the glitter of wealth, but the most delicate motions of our hearts. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

10 " Look at Tain Shir and you cannot fathom the name behind the cartouche. You cannot extract her reasons. You only see why men turn to religion: for hope that there are gods to oppose her. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

11 " Was goodness still good if you hewed it out of tactical necessity? Was there, Baru wondered, any difference between being good and pretending to be good for your own gain, if you took the same actions in the end? Was there any difference between telling the truth unconditionally, and deploying the truth in service of your agenda, if you told the same truth? "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

12 " You sound like you're in love," Abdumasi says. "I read that you can fall in love with someone before you've ever met them. And when you see them at last, you say, '*Oh, that's why I hurt,*' like you just found an old splinter buried in your foot."

You hate splinters, so you shudder. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

13 " Was goodness still good if you hewed to it out of tactical necessity? Was there, Baru wondered, any difference between being good and pretending to be good for your own gain, if you took the same actions in the end? Was there any difference between telling the truth unconditionally, and deploying the truth in service of your agenda, if you told the same truth? "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

14 " It was so anathema and yet so necessary: it felt like a razor unraveling her, one cut all the way from her anus to the back of her neck, degloving her whole body and turning her inside out so her secrets were on the outside to become her lies. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

15 " 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, and 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. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

16 " She had to pretend to be untouched by the execution, so that she *could* be untouched by the execution. For what, in the end, was the difference between pretending perfectly to feel something, and actually feeling it? If you acted the same way, truth or lie? "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

17 " But," Tahr said, kissing her next pawn in thought, "they always come back to each other. That's better than being inseparable, I think. To be separable, but bound. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

18 " Why did everything hurt?

Because everything kept working. Everything kept on as if nothing had happened. And Baru *needed* everything to hurt: Baru needed a sword for a spine, so that if she ever bent from her purpose, she'd be cut. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

19 " 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. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)

20 " Honor,” Apparitor murmured, “is just a credit rating for violence. "

― Seth Dickinson , The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2)