Lorn au Arcos Quotes

"When you are in the salt, you feel like every gale is the world ender. Every wave the greatest that has been. These boys ride the gales in rapture at their own glory. But every now and then, a true storm rises. It shatters their masts and rips the hair from their heads. They do not last long till the sea swallows them whole. But their mothers have wept their deaths long before, as I wept for yours the first day we met."

"You meet a man, you know him. You meet a woman, she knows you."

"The Society was created to instill order. Men were made to sacrifice so that humanity endured. They were given Colors, lives limited and ordered so that we could destroy the timeless cycle of our race—prosperity to greed to war. Gold was meant to shepherd the other Colors, not devour them. Now we are trapped again in that cycle, the very thing we endeavored to avoid. So the Society? The beautiful sum of all human enterprise? It’s been dead and rotting for hundreds of years, and those who fight over it are but vultures and maggots."

"I would not have raised you to be a great man. There is no peace for great men. I would have had you be a decent one. I would have given you the quiet strength to grow old with the woman you love."

"Honor in the first. Honor in the last. Those are my family words. Whereas you … young lady, well, the name Julii does not exactly lift one to nobler purpose, does it? You’re just traders."

"Love and war. Same coin. Different sides."

"I treat people kindly. Pinks, Browns, Reds are people. Your Ragnar is a weapon."

"You will fall to ruin because you believe that exceptions to the rule make new rules. That an evil man can shed the trappings of wickedness just because you want him to. Men do not change. That is why I killed the Rath boy. Learn the lesson now, so you don’t have to learn it with a knife in your back later. The Colors exist for a reason. Reputations exist for a reason."

"I don’t like that you brought me here. I don’t believe you’re being the man you want to be. If you survive this and I don’t, be better than the man who tricked his friend."

"Achilles let his pride and rage consume him, and in the end, an arrow shot by a Pixie took him in the foot. There’s much to live for besides this. Hopefully you’ll grow old enough to realize that Achilles was a gorydamn fool. And we’re fools all the more for not realizing he wasn’t Homer’s hero. He was warning. I feel like men once knew that."

"Each time I returned to my wife, I told her that her boys died well.” He fidgets with his ring. “There’s no such thing."

"Never fight a river, and never fight Aja."

"Mercy emboldens evil men."

"The old rage in colder ways, for they alone decide how to spend the young."