18 Quotes by David Anthony Durham

I sleep lightly and tread to keep my head out of the sea of dreams.

She was a nightmare of beauty and menace living right there above them, a being part raptor, part human, part divine. She knew without question that she could sweep down on them and inflict upon all of them a terrible vengeance if she wished. She had the capacity for violence within her, residing beside her heart.

She said, A king is the best and worst of men. Of course. Of course.

She would never be caught unprepared again, she swore to herself. She would never trust. Never love. Never put faith in other human beings again. She would learn all she could of the shape and substance of the world, and she would find a way to survive in it.

She realized that she had naïvely believed that the workings of the world revolved around her and her family. Never before had she acknowledged that somebody else’s life might alter hers.

The world was not to be trusted. Loved persons were always stolen. Dreams always squashed. That was life as she understood it.

Respect flows two ways and can mean as much to the giver as to the one receiving.

Imagine, they said, living an existence where the words out of your mouth changed the very fabric of the world around you.

She sat, rediscovering the fullness of her first tongue in one long submersion. Again and again she would pause on a word Melio uttered. She would roll it around in her mind, feeling the contours of it. At times her mouth gaped open, her lips moving as if she were drinking in his words instead of breathing.