540 Quotes by Kiersten White

He respected them, and he hated them, and he knew the world would be lesser for their deaths.

I have met your sister, and I have met Mehmed. They love themselves and their ambition above all else. They love what feeds their ambition, and when it stops feeding that, the love will turn to hate with more passion than either could ever love with. You love with all your heart, Radu, and deserve someone who can answer that with all of theirs.

He had imagined Constantinople, had wanted it for Mehmed. It had been simple and straightforward. But now he knew the true cost of things, the murky horrors of the distance between wanting something and getting it.

But they were capable of greatness. Destined for it, even.” “Then do not aim for greatness. Aim for goodness. And however you get there will be the right path for you, my sweet Radu.

Today, he saw the true cost of two men’s immovable wills. He saw what happened when men were forced to fight each other for months on end. It was not merely sickness of the body that plagued sieges, but sickness of the soul that turned men into monsters.

Perhaps, looking out over it, Mehmed saw what the beginning of his legacy would eventually lead to. Whatever Mehmed did, whatever he built, the greatest city in the world was irrefutable evidence that all things died.

It was wrong, this weighing and measuring lives as though they were coins that could be spent or saved. He longed to be free of it all, to live among men seeing everyone as his brother, to view no one as his enemy.

It had felt unavoidable at the time, but how many unavoidable choices of his had resulted in unforgivable consequences?

And that was why she would win in the end. Because she would offer up everything on the altar of sacrifice, so long as she kept her country.