166 Quotes by Robert Jackson Bennett

Historians, I think, should be keepers of truth. We must tell things as they are – honestly, and without subversion. That is the greatest good one can do.

You’ve always believed war to be a grand performance. But to me it’s just killing, just the ugliest thing a person can ever do... So when you need to do it, there’s no need to make a show of it.

We are beautiful, strange creatures of heat and noise, of sudden, inscrutable impulses, of savage passions... Yet when we consider our existence, we think ourselves calm, composed, rational, in control... All the while forgetting that we are at the mercy of these rebellious hidden systems – and the elements, of course. And when the elements have their way, and the tiny fire within us flickers out... What then? A blast of silence, probably, and no more.

You can be a girl at any age, you know. Girls at forty. Girls at fifty. There’s a kind of flightiness to them, just like how a man at forty can have the impatience and belligerence of a five-year-old boy. But you can also be a woman at any age.

But that which you draw power from, you are also powerless before.

She devoted her life to this place, this work. If that doesn’t make a home, Turyin Mulaghesh, then nothing does.

It’s like an eraser, only I designed it to be attracted to erase one specific thing... the tissue lining the human heart.

Torture usually gets you whatever you want to hear. And people are usually much more forgiving of this method. Mostly because they’re never quite sure any of it really happened.

And then he understands: it’s a loop, an endless loop of injured children, growing old but keeping their pain fresh and new, causing yet more injury and starting the whole cycle over again.