30 Quotes by Sofia Samatar

One wants to ask what the hell his parents made him for--which, is you will recall, the central question of Frankenstein's monster. What the hell did you make me for, and why did you make me like this? To a failed experiment, the failure is unforgivable.

Outside the window, just past my aunt, spread the windswept sky of Bain. Gulls swung between the towers. The sun struck a distant window that glittered so brightly I thought, for a moment, it was a tear in the corner of my eye. How quickly the world comes down, as if it were only made of paper.

The swordmaiden wears her loyalty like a necklace of dead stars. Their worth is eternal, although they no longer shine.

Beyond the rock where we sheltered there was a blackness filled with screams where all the gods unknown to us had been released.

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.

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.

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

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

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.