Seth Dickinson Quotes & Sayings

The tide is coming in," he said. "The ocean has reached this little pool. There will be turbulence, and confusion, and ruin. This is what happens when something small joins something vast. — Seth Dickinson

Everyone was someone else's instrument. But she would have to take him into confidence and use him as a trusted instrument nonetheless. — Seth Dickinson

Oh," she said. "Yes." She was warm with the wine, with the shape of the plan she'd begun to form, and could not keep the merriment from her voice, the joy of reaching out into the world and altering it. "There will be a price. — Seth Dickinson

That old sick joy, her first and favorite drug. Control. — Seth Dickinson

In the absence of direction, claim and expand the freedom to act as you will. — Seth Dickinson

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

Baru raised her hand to smash the wineglass. Checked herself, checked even her trembling, and stood there in absurd pantomime, too firmly in control of her anger to move, too deeply angry for anything but stillness. — Seth Dickinson

Certainly I do." He spat into the hilltop grass. "Spymasters never lie. — Seth Dickinson

I am Baru Cormorant," she protested, "accountant. — Seth Dickinson

Her fury had nothing else to eat and so it began to eat her. — Seth Dickinson

Cover your cocks," the men sailors sometimes joked. "They're always hunting sodomites."
"What do they do to sodomites?" Baru asked.
They looked at her with some astonishment. "Hot iron," one said. "Hssssssssss. — Seth Dickinson

The Hierarchic Qualm: The sword kills. 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. — Seth Dickinson

Understood what the books and the generals always repeated: that armies did not kill each other, they broke each other, that the day would be won when one army believed it could not survive. A matter of deception, of conviction, of lies made true through performance. Like everything else. — Seth Dickinson

It's hard to find good stories now. — Seth Dickinson

Tired of doing hurt, and tired of taking it. Tired of the great cartographic project. Isn't it a little like cartography? Meeting lovely people, mapping them, racing to find their hurts before they can find yours - getting use from them, squeezing them dry, and then striking first, unilaterally and with awful effect, because the alternative is waiting for them to do the same to you. These are the rules, you didn't make them, they're not your fault. So you might as well play to win. — Seth Dickinson

With the discipline of the body comes discipline of the soul. — Seth Dickinson

I am an accountant." Baru wished she could close her ears to the screams of the sectioned, smoking crowd. "I deal in costs, not faiths." "But you are part of this." Tain Hu was a little taller and she moved with purposeful force. Her words, no matter how soft, were not unintimidating. "This is a cost. This is the cost we pay for broad roads and hot water, for banks and new crops. This is the trade you demand." And there was no doubt who she meant, for she used Aphalone's singular you. "This resistance is meaningless," Baru said. "If they want change, they must make themselves useful to Falcrest. Find a way up from within." "A people can only bear the lash so long in silence. Some things are not worth being within. — Seth Dickinson

The problem is caring too much, caring so much you can't ask for help because everyone else is already in so much pain. — Seth Dickinson

Trust, like money, needed a guarantee to back it. — Seth Dickinson

The terror that took Baru came from the deepest part of her soul. It was a terror particular to her, a fundamental concern - the apocalyptic possibility that the world simply did not permit plans, that it worked in chaotic and unmasterable ways, that one single stroke of fortune, one well-aimed bowshot by a man she had never met, could bring total disaster. The fear that the basic logic she used to negotiate the world was a lie. Or, worse, that she herself could not plan: that she was as blind as a child, too limited and self-deceptive to integrate the necessary information, and that when the reckoning between her model and the pure asymbolic fact of the world came, the world would devour her like a cuttlefish snapping up bait. — Seth Dickinson

Her thoughts ran in cannibal circles. — Seth Dickinson

She looked that word up too, hoping to understand it, as understanding gave her power over things. — Seth Dickinson

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. — Seth Dickinson

This is the truth. You will know because it hurts. — Seth Dickinson

It would be a better land if only it could be ruled sensibly. — Seth Dickinson

Salt and citrus," Cairdine Farrier said, joining her at the stern with a lemon in each hand. "The chemicals of empire."
"Salt to preserve food for long journeys," Baru recited. "Citrus for scurvy. — Seth Dickinson

If the Masquerade could not be stopped by spear or treaty, she would change it from within. — Seth Dickinson

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

Is this how you think we should fight, Baru Fisher? With coin and open roads?" "No war has ever been won by slaughtering the enemy wholesale. — Seth Dickinson

More than anything else in the universe, more than the power to dictate law at Taranoke, more than the knowledge of the count of stars in the sky, Baru wanted in that moment to speak the truth.

But she had no tongue for it. She had burnt all her truth away. Alloyed it into the machine — Seth Dickinson

None of it could be reduced to something as simple as invader and invaded. Baru saw in the city what she felt in herself. The two-faced allegiances, the fearful monitoring of self and surroundings, the whimpering need to please somehow kneeling alongside marrow-deep defiance. One eye set on a future of glittering wealthy subservience, the other turned to a receding and irretrievable freedom. The liquor of empire, alluring and corrosive at once, saturating everything, every old division of sex and race and history, remaking it all with the promise and the threat of power. — Seth Dickinson

Every moment is an edict spoken by its past. The past is the real tyranny. — Seth Dickinson

She moved and spoke decisively, sometimes with a certain impatience, as if the world dragged two steps behind her will and she found the friction grating. — Seth Dickinson

And he looked at her with open eyes, the bone of his heavy brow a bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth. — Seth Dickinson

Jesus, this world, this world. I feel so heartsick. I cannot even retch.

And I dream of that awful board, piled with tokens moving each other by their own secret rules. A game of alien powers but those powers escape the game to move among us. They roam the world cow-eyed and compassionate and offer hands with fingers like fishhooks. We live in a paddock, a fattening pen, and we cannot leave it, because when we try to go the hooks say, Think of who you'll hurt.

So much hurt to try to heal. And the healing hurts too much. — Seth Dickinson

I have been a servant too long. I want to help make something free. — Seth Dickinson

There was nowhere in the world, Baru thought, no collection of lords or lovers, that did not have its own politics. — Seth Dickinson