Ekaterina Sedia Quotes
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You know how they say the grass is always greener on the other side? It is greener, because you're not there. And if you go you'll trample it and leave dirty footprints and probably spill something poisonous.
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This story does not have a happy ending; they almost never do. The only happy stories you will ever hear are told by men—they spin their lies, trying to convince themselves that they cause no devastation, and that the hearts they break were never worth much to begin with.
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Your people are losing your jobs to your machines. You put mechanizing everything and making it efficient above your people's happiness, and you wonder why they aren't happy.
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God has a way of guiding us sometimes.
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If she were to get her key back, she thought, no one but her would ever touch it. She would wind herself well in advance so that she would never need to rely on another to keep herself alive.
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The crows demur at first, but soon grow bold and eat. He talks to them. He tells them of all the things that bother him—that the politics have changed but the politicians are still the same exact people as back in the sixties, only balder and fatter; he tells them that nobody cares about anything important anymore. He tells them that freedom has nothing to do with money, or the McDonald’s restaurants. The crows stop eating and listen.
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We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try.
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They, the women, were like the gargoyles, Mattie thought. Respected in words, but hidden from view of those who ran the city and managing to live in the darkness, in the secret interstices of life.
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We can get over the wrongs we do, but we cannot forgive ourselves for the wrongs done to us, for our own helplessness.
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The spirits, he said, the souls. They are not angry at the living, they just want to help. Helping others is the only way we can prove we still matter.
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There's only so far you can push a horse before it collapses.
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Travel lets you pretend that the world didn’t really change, that you just chose your terms.
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The bird Gamayun was related to Alkonost and Sirin in some vague fashion-even the most casual observer would've noticed that all three of them were not entirely birds; they had the faces and breasts of women, severe but beautiful. And when their lips opened, they sand in women's voices, deep and rich and bittersweet.
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He was still wide awake when the morning came - the light changed imperceptibly underground, with the glowtrees flaring up brightly, and the shimmer of golden dust that remained suspended in the musty air, as if millions of butterflies had shed the scales of their wings in midair.
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That was the trouble with the supernatural, Vimbai thought--you didn't know what laws ruled it, and what was a coincidence and what was a sign and what was weird and what wasn't. It was like a whodunit, only the clues refused to be arranged into any sort of hierarchy or a straight narrative, and most of the time it wasn't even clear if they indeed were clues; a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces were blank.
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The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try.
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The world grows less familiar with every day, and one needs to have a steady constant flame of familiarity one can return to when the dragon airships are gone and the reverse corsets are packed away in oak chests. Any adventure must give away to familiarity of routine, and I look to what lies ahead of me, clear eyed and level headed, knowing that both changes and constancy have their place in the world, and that I can survive either.
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Helen devises plans to become a monster herself.
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Blood always called to blood, no matter how distant.