Sofia Samatar Quotes & Sayings

His exaltation left no room for the human. — Sofia Samatar

Kids are not fooled when we try to cover up inequality. They will divide a cookie precisely in half. They're the most conscientious people in the world that way. — Sofia Samatar

The truth has its own virtue, which is separate from its content. — Sofia Samatar

Those who spend long hours engaged in reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward. — Sofia Samatar

All bleed who fight with the sword. All confront, with greater or lesser difficulty, the worship of their own flesh. The swordmaiden faces particular obstacles in this matter: she will have seen, in the temples and elsewhere, many images of unscarred women. — Sofia Samatar

The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. — Sofia Samatar

I sat enchanted, far from my gods, adrift in the boat of spices, in the sigh of the South, in the net of the wheeling stars, in the country of dolphins. — Sofia Samatar

All through my journey his stories had fallen like snow. He was as full of them as a library with unmarked shelves. He was a talking book. — Sofia Samatar

The word for 'book' in all the known languages of the earth is vallon, 'chamber of words' ... — Sofia Samatar

There is nothing, he tells me, more odious than a German. However, their women are seductive, and they make the world's most beautiful music. My employer sings me a German song. He sounds like a buffalo in distress. Afterward he makes me read to him from the Bible. — Sofia Samatar

It was "a shape to make men weep," wrote Firdred of Bain when he first saw it: "exactly the shape of a desecrated sea. — Sofia Samatar

She ignited her heart by touching it to his; and after that there was no peace for either of them. — Sofia Samatar

To lose a sibling is to lose the one different from you. There's no one now against whom to say: But I am like this. I am this. — Sofia Samatar

[h]ope, like a desert aloe. Hope, stubborn and bitter to the taste. That hides water. That bears the drought. An ugly plant with the power to heal. — Sofia Samatar

The night sky was distended in my dreams, sinking to earth with the weight of destructive glory behind it. In one of those dreams I reached up and touched it gently with a fingertip, and it burst like a yolk, releasing a deluge of light. — Sofia Samatar

Once you have built something - something that takes all your passion and will - it becomes more precious to you than your own happiness. You don't realise that, while you are building it. That you are creating a martyrdom - something which, later, will make you suffer. — Sofia Samatar

The tunneling entrance curves before it opens into this space and there is absolute, waiting, coiled, and sentient blackness. — Sofia Samatar

Long is the journey homeward, Weary and worn are we. Oh, if I fall behind, my love, Will you look back for? — Sofia Samatar

I should die," said Ivrom. "That is blasphemy," the old man answered kindly. "I should suffer." "You are suffering, are you not?" "Not enough." "Consider the sufferings ordained by the Nameless Gods," the priest quoted. "A cupful weighs as much as an ocean." In fact - as Ivrom would discover later - a cupful weighs much more. When — Sofia Samatar

As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendour of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbour City, whose lights and colours spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart: it is the light the local people call 'the breath of angels' ... — Sofia Samatar

I want to stay there. I don't want to go any further. I want to stay. I can't remember who it was - one of the poets, perhaps Tamundein - who said that all of our happiest hours must pass away at last, even those in which we believe we are unhappy. — Sofia Samatar

But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears. — Sofia Samatar

It is ... courage to choose not what will make us happy, but what is precious. — Sofia Samatar

Words are sublime, and in books we may commune with the dead. Beyond this there is nothing true, no voices we can hear. — Sofia Samatar

I sat down in the wilderness with my books, and wept for joy. — Sofia Samatar