Ian Tregillis Quotes

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

Huygens, there are times when I take comfort in my sinful nature, for it means I’ll meet you in hell. I’ll be the one stomping on your jewels with singular dedication.

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.

Your family excels at being a pain in my ass. Are you certain you’re not part Dutch?

The duke was right about you."\n"He survived? That's a shame.

But the speculation was pointless. The past was forever in the past.

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

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.

Perhaps there really was a God, and He was just as cruel as the humans He made in His form.

It’s not my fault your makers made you humorless.

It isn’t courtly politics if somebody doesn’t get a dagger in the back.

Such were the brittle threads of a relationship built not on trust but on a slurry of fear, mutual codependence, and self-interest.

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

He’d expected torture. He hadn’t expected surgery.

“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.