20 Quotes by Ian Tregillis

Having tasted life without the pain of obligation perpetually burning him from within, he’d choose death over the return to bondage. He’d make that choice in an instant. Life as a slave was unspeakable; life as a slave who had briefly tasted freedom was unthinkable.

Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph on a bad-tempered camel.

Oh, for crying out loud,” she said. “Were you fools any more chivalrous I’d surely swoon on the spot and damage my uterus.

The prosperity achieved through slavery had a way of blinding men’s hearts to the evil of their own hands.

The clockwork men and women fated to maneuver the oars twenty-four hours per day until the ship reached its destination had turned their silent voices to song as they bent their backs to row. They sang not in any human language but in the secret language of the mechanicals. A shanty sung in the click-tick-click of clockwork bodies, the crash of tapped feet, the clatter of metal hands gripping banded wooden spars.

How did humans guide themselves? How did they know what to do and what not to do?

Jesus Christ on a six-day wine bender.

Jesus’s bloody tears.