The Traitor Baru Cormorant Quotes

“This is the truth. You will know because it hurts.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“Freedom granted by your rulers is just a chain with a little slack.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“Her fury had nothing else to eat and so it began to eat her.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“She had always loved the stars. But in the desert of winter it was impossible to forget that they were cold, and distant, and did not care.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“Good-bye, she thinks. Good-bye, kuye lam. I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“Money is only one kind of power. Faith is power, too. Love is power. Slaughter and madness are both roads to power. Certainly, symbols are power – you wear one wherever you go, that purse you carry. And you wear others when you decide to dress yourself, how to look at men and women, how to carry your body and direct your gaze. And all these symbols can raise people to labour or war.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“It's not what the Masquerade does to you that you should you fear, she wanted to tell Ake. It's what the Masquerade convinces you to do to yourself.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“Every moment is an edict spoken by its past. The past is the real tyranny.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“The Hierarchic Qualm: The sword kills. But the arm moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath to duty, and that duty moves the mind, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“I have committed a terrible crime,” she said, voice firm, controlled, machined to a polish. “So terrible that I feel I can do anything, commit any sin, betray any trust, because no matter what ruin I make of myself, it cannot be worse than what I have already done.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“And he looked at her with open eyes, the bone of his heavy brow a bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“None of it could be reduced to something as simple as invader and invaded. Baru saw in the city what she felt in herself. The two-faced allegiances, the fearful monitoring of self and surroundings, the whimpering need to please somehow kneeling alongside marrow-deep defiance. One eye set on a future of glittering wealthy subservience, the other turned to a receding and irretrievable freedom. The liquor of empire, alluring and corrosive at once, saturating everything, every old division of sex and race and history, remaking it all with the promise and the threat of power.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“I am an accountant.” Baru wished she could close her ears to the screams of the sectioned, smoking crowd. “I deal in costs, not faiths.” “But you are part of this.” Tain Hu was a little taller and she moved with purposeful force. Her words, no matter how soft, were not unintimidating. “This is a cost. This is the cost we pay for broad roads and hot water, for banks and new crops. This is the trade you demand.” And there was no doubt who she meant, for she used Aphalone’s singular you. “This resistance is meaningless,” Baru said. “If they want change, they must make themselves useful to Falcrest. Find a way up from within.” “A people can only bear the lash so long in silence. Some things are not worth being within.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“I have a theory," Tain Hu said, "regarding your attention to birds."
"Oh?"
"It's the only tongue of your homeland that you can still hear spoken aloud.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“Without any outward sign or motion, in the wreckage of herself, she donned her armor, made it firm around her heart. Raise her mask: a cold discipline, a steel beneath her skin.
Grow comfortable, she told herself. It will never come off.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“That old sick joy, her first and favorite drug. Control.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“The tide is coming in,” he said. “The ocean has reached this little pool. There will be turbulence, and confusion, and ruin. This is what happens when something small joins something vast.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“Better a woman of divided loyalties than one of no loyalty at all. Better a reluctant traitor than the terror of a true sociopath.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“The terror that took Baru came from the deepest part of her soul. It was a terror particular to her, a fundamental concern—the apocalyptic possibility that the world simply did not permit plans, that it worked in chaotic and unmasterable ways, that one single stroke of fortune, one well-aimed bowshot by a man she had never met, could bring total disaster. The fear that the basic logic she used to negotiate the world was a lie. Or, worse, that she herself could not plan: that she was as blind as a child, too limited and self-deceptive to integrate the necessary information, and that when the reckoning between her model and the pure asymbolic fact of the world came, the world would devour her like a cuttlefish snapping up bait.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“Understood what the books and the generals always repeated: that armies did not kill each other, they broke each other, that the day would be won when one army believed it could not survive. A matter of deception, of conviction, of lies made true through performance. Like everything else.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“Baru raised her hand to smash the wineglass. Checked herself, checked even her trembling, and stood there in absurd pantomime, too firmly in control of her anger to move, too deeply angry for anything but stillness.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“With the discipline of the body comes discipline of the soul.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“I used to wonder if you were a monster. Now I know the answer. If you want power in this world, power enough to change it, it seems you have to be.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“No war has ever been won by slaughtering the enemy wholesale.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“In the absence of direction, claim and expand the freedom to act as you will.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“She looked that word up too, hoping to understand it, as understanding gave her power over things.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“Your tactics are self-centered. You have forgotten that you are not the only player on the board, that inherent talent speaks for no more than experience, and that others around you seek to expand their authority and constrain yours.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“I have been a servant too long. I want to help make something free.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“Aurdwynn has one great habit, Your Excellence, one constant touchstone, no matter who rules.” Her secretary hesitated over the map, his own fingers half-curled, as if of half a mind to draw her hand away from a flame. “Rebellion.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant