Kalindora au San Quotes

"Your sensors picked up some people.” She levers to her feet as I climb into my cockpit. “Did your sensors tell you they didn’t have weapons? No. Did they tell you they weren’t saboteurs or snipers? No. Or even Howlers? No. So how can mercy exist when anyone could carry an atomic rocket, and you don’t know? That’s the problem with this war. Cruelty is necessary. Yet cruelty is a thermal runaway."

"What think you the dead are? Why, dust and clay, What should they be? ’Tis the last hour of day. Look on the west, how beautiful it is Vaulted with radiant vapours! The deep bliss of that unutterable light Perhaps the only comfort which remains Is the unheeded clanking of my chains, The which I make, and call it melody."

"Love may give one wings, but everything burns when it flies too close to the sun."

"Sovereign.” She spits the word. “All my life I’ve served. Octavia, then Magnus, then Atalantia. Everyone sits on that stool and tells me I did it with such honor. And every time I hear it, I want to tear their tongues out."

"If you regret you are evil, it is still evil. I’ve killed old men in their beds. Children under the feet of their own horses, mothers who begged me to spare their unborn. All because I was a stupid girl who thought her father looked beautiful in his armor. When he retired, I begged to take his oath to my Sovereign. He wept that day. I never knew why till after he died. I thought his oath gave him purpose. He was too honorable to say it imprisoned him. And the day he found freedom, he saw his daughter enslaved."

"‘Get them while they’re young,’ she told Magnus once. ‘Get them while they’re young, then you’ve got them forever.’ Honor, duty: it’s all a lie. By the time you know better, you’re too dirty to get out. Octavia poisoned me. She made me fear to be alone so much that I believed only the darkness would want me.” Her hand trembles upward to touch my face. “Somehow she didn’t poison you."

"She…saw what Octavia was. How her grip was squeezing tighter and tighter till it would choke our world. She thought the burning of Rhea was an abomination. And she saw how slowly her mother was trying to corrupt you. So with Romulus’s father, Revus, and Nero au Augustus, she planned a coup. Lysander, it wasn’t Outriders or terrorists who killed your mother. It was Octavia who gave the order."

"Do your duty! Do your duty or the worlds will burn."

"She would burn the worlds so long as the ashes kneel."