Цитаты из книги Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea

darinakh
20 июля 2023
Freedom in death was no freedom at all.
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darinakh
22 июля 2023
To what extent could anyone be trusted? The promise of money or power was enough to sway most people. As for the rest, the threat of violence to themselves or their loved ones usually made short work of their principles.
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darinakh
3 июля 2023
How did any girl learn to become a woman? By observing the women around them—the aunties were correct in that regard. But by observing the women around them, girls also learned what they didn’t wish to become. The aunties never mentioned this because, naturally, they thought themselves paragons of womanhood.
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darinakh
20 июля 2023
“Why do you need all this power?” Wo-Yuet had asked her. “So that others don’t have power over me,” Shek Yeung had answered, or something to that effect.
7 понравилось
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darinakh
19 июля 2023
“Sometimes,” she said, searching for the words, “we have to do what we don’t want to get what we want. When I was your age, I couldn’t accept that everything comes with a price. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
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darinakh
17 июля 2023
Could she ever cannibalize another person? Sure, if she was hungry enough.
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43
darinakh
17 июля 2023
You think you know the breadth of the sky just because you serve no master? Your master is your arrogance, and one day he will abandon you.
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46
darinakh
10 июля 2023
People waste too much time trying to convince others of lies,” he once said, “when all they have to do is interpret the truth in a way that benefits them. Swindlers know this well. If my purse is empty, I cannot convince you that it is full. You have eyes. But if I show you my empty purse while dressed in my finest clothes and say that I was robbed, then not only are you likely to believe I am a rich man, you may even ‘loan’ me some money in hopes that I will repay you with interest.
7 понравилось
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darinakh
10 июля 2023
Pity me, the tears said. Shek Yeung always wanted to reply, Heaven pities no one. If you must cry, then cry for everyone in the world. In the end the only thing a person can be promised in life is suffering.
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darinakh
3 июля 2023
Where Wo-Yuet was pale and delicate with a small round mouth, the kind of beauty plain at a glance, Shek Yeung was dark and feral with thick hair and deep-set eyes, the kind of beauty one learned to appreciate only after realizing how useful the possessor of said beauty could be.
7 понравилось
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darinakh
3 июля 2023
As a child, she’d gazed out at the waves and seen only freedom. As an adult, she knew nothing was so simple. For every measure of freedom the sea gave, it took one away.
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darinakh
20 июля 2023
The fact was, sometimes nice people, like her mother, died early, whereas mean people, like the couple of aunties who were always yelling at her to be more ladylike, endured. But as she would learn the day the pirates came, what was hers wasn’t even necessarily hers to keep.
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darinakh
15 июля 2023
“There is no true difference between pirates and soldiers,” Cheng Yat once told Shek Yeung. “They get their power from different places, but in the end, power is power.”
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darinakh
10 июля 2023
From what she’d seen, Europeans valued their comfort greatly, valued it so much they believed in a kingdom of everlasting happiness and bounty after death. Over the years she’d encountered a couple of their missionaries. She didn’t understand how anyone could espouse something so ridiculous. Nothing in the world was everlasting: not kingdoms, not peace, not happiness.
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darinakh
10 июля 2023
«Indeed. You look young as ever, lambent like the vernal sun.”
“Oh, you flatter me. You yourself seem to be in radiant health.»
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darinakh
6 июля 2023
With sweet words and warm hands, one could coax information out of all but the most guarded of the men. Information could be sold or bartered. Information built empires and decimated armies.
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darinakh
3 июля 2023
“You have many questions.”
“How could I not? This has to do with my future.”
“This is true, but you are forgetting something.”
“What’s that?”
“The past and the future are but points on a circle. What will be, always was. To look to your future, we must first look to your past.”
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darinakh
3 июля 2023
There were many gods in Heaven, one for whatever a person lacked (after all, wasn’t lack the foundation of being human?).
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darinakh
3 июля 2023
Life and conflict go hand in hand.
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darinakh
17 июля 2023
When someone wielded that much power over someone else, fear would always be a barrier between them, no matter how well the one in power treated the other.
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