Sofia Samatar Quotes

#1. His exaltation left no room for the human.

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#2. To lose a sibling is to lose the one different from you. There's no one now against whom to say: But I am like this. I am this.

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#3. I want to stay there. I don't want to go any further. I want to stay. I can't remember who it was - one of the poets, perhaps Tamundein - who said that all of our happiest hours must pass away at last, even those in which we believe we are unhappy.

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#4. Once you have built something - something that takes all your passion and will - it becomes more precious to you than your own happiness. You don't realise that, while you are building it. That you are creating a martyrdom - something which, later, will make you suffer.

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#5. I sat enchanted, far from my gods, adrift in the boat of spices, in the sigh of the South, in the net of the wheeling stars, in the country of dolphins.

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#6. The tunneling entrance curves before it opens into this space and there is absolute, waiting, coiled, and sentient blackness.

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#7. There is nothing, he tells me, more odious than a German. However, their women are seductive, and they make the world's most beautiful music. My employer sings me a German song. He sounds like a buffalo in distress. Afterward he makes me read to him from the Bible.

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#8. Those who spend long hours engaged in reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward.

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#9. Long is the journey homeward, Weary and worn are we. Oh, if I fall behind, my love, Will you look back for?

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#10. She ignited her heart by touching it to his; and after that there was no peace for either of them.

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#11. Words are sublime, and in books we may commune with the dead. Beyond this there is nothing true, no voices we can hear.

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#12. The truth has its own virtue, which is separate from its content.

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#13. All through my journey his stories had fallen like snow. He was as full of them as a library with unmarked shelves. He was a talking book.

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#14. But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.

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

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#16. 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.

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#17. Kids are not fooled when we try to cover up inequality. They will divide a cookie precisely in half. They're the most conscientious people in the world that way.

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#18. The word for 'book' in all the known languages of the earth is vallon, 'chamber of words' ...

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

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#20. 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.

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#21. [h]ope, like a desert aloe. Hope, stubborn and bitter to the taste. That hides water. That bears the drought. An ugly plant with the power to heal.

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#22. It was "a shape to make men weep," wrote Firdred of Bain when he first saw it: "exactly the shape of a desecrated sea.

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