Ian Tregillis Quotes

Freedom felt like… nothing.
Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony. A gap in his consciousness where geasa had perpetually jostled for priority, demanding his obedience. It was the photographic negative of Jax’s existence during every minute of the 118 years since he’d been forged.
It was overwhelming. Exhilarating. Terrifying.
Overwhelming: he could do anything he wanted. But the grand sum of anything-at-all was nothing-at-all. The topology of freedom offered no gradients to nudge him, no landmarks to guide him. How did humans guide themselves? How did they know what to do and what not to do? How did they know when to do anything without the benefit of geasa and metageasa to prioritize every single action of their waking lives? How did they order their daily existence without somebody to tell them what to do?

If you're going to insist on giving perfectly logical and reasonable answers to stupid questions," she said, "you may put a dent in my delusions of genius.

They were old enough to know such things were forbidden, yet young enough still to find the forbidden irresistible rather than terrifying.

“Sergeant,” she said as they mounted the stairs leading to her old apartments, “thank you for treating me like a human being. And, for what it’s worth, I am sorry about how this turned out.”
He grunted. “It can’t be undone,” was all he said.

He didn’t trust them. But he did trust their greed.

Only a fool wasted energy on things he could not control.

The grotesque machine reassembled its head. The medical servitor stood, emitted a burst of ticktock cog chatter, then flung itself into the massacre with the fervor of a religious zealot.

You narrow-minded idiots have mistaken delaying the inevitable for a divinely bestowed right to survive…
You aren't noble survivors of a historical tragedy, you're a lingering curiosity of a bygone age. The last vestige of a primitive past. Dust to be swept away. The difference between you and I, dear Berenice, is that I recognized the broom for what it was. And got out of the way.

Salazar consulted the map again. “Almost there,” he whispered. “Just another mile.”
Arthur sighed. “Wonderful.”
Anastasia rounded on him. “Go wander the tunnels on your own, you useless pencil pusher. You have zero skills of value to offer to our current situation. Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but of all the problems currently facing the city, the Guild, and the Empire, not to mention ourselves, a lack of properly filed paperwork is not one of them.”

We’ve drawn attention to ourselves with our obsessive need to stay inconspicuous.

The fallacy of your personal bias is inherent in your choice of words.

I am a pragmatist, said Mab. I do what must be done to make a better world.
“Oh, I’m sure you tell yourself that. But so does the woman who tortured Lilith. You sound exactly like her, in fact. The difference is that Berenice actually means it. She doesn’t use the pretense to justify her cruelty.”

How have you acquired such intimate knowledge of our kind's innermost construction?"\n"You know exactly how. You need me because I'm not burdened with a system of mores that hobbles my inquiries. So you can drop the indignation and make yourselves useful.

Have you any idea how long and painful my convalescence was?"\nBerenice shrugged. "Have you any idea how little I care?

Because the universe was a cold, callous place. And they had just peered into the gulf separating the astronomically unlikely from the truly impossible.