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Famous Brian Staveley Quotes

“It was watching the priestess in that moment, seeing her for what she was— stunning but bloody, gorgeous but mortal, bereft but joyful— that I understood, finally, about love. She had been telling me, but I couldn't see it, couldn't believe it until I saw her staring at the body of the man she'd loved, standing and singing, utterly undiminished by his absence. This was the lesson I couldn't learn even from a lifetime gazing into my own heart, from a million nights fighting Ruc or feeling him move inside me: Love is not some eternal state, but a delight in the paradise of the imperfect. The holding of a thing is inextricable from the letting go, and to love, you must learn both. The world was still beautiful—Ela felt that, and as she sang, I felt the music rising inside me finally, in my flesh and mind—the music of joy and all the wonder that cannot last, of joy, not in the having, but in the passage—and I opened my mouth to sing alongside her, to pour into the world that corporeal trembling without which our lives mean nothing, nor our deaths.”

LoveLetting GoEternalSingingAbsenceMeaningImperfectPassage
Book:Skullsworn
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“I'd been treating love like a thing, an achievement, a trophy to be and hung around my neck. People talk about it that way sometimes. My love for you is undying. He never knew my love. It is an error of grammar to make love a noun. It is not a thing you can have. Love—like doubt or hate—is a verb. It has no fixity. Like song, it's truth is in its unfolding. Language is filled with these illusions. A fist, an embrace, A blow—they are actions, not things. Action takes time, and time is the tool of my god.”

LoveActionLanguageThingVerbNoun
Book:Skullsworn
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“Killing is not something you do privately, in the space of your own head. It happens here.” She opened her arms, as though to embrace the whole world. “In the relationship between bodies…” “It's the same with love,” she went on. “You're going at the whole thing as though it's a problem with you, inside of you, sealed off from the rest of the world. It's not. Love isn't a part of you or your lover. It's not something you can have, like a pile of gold or a pet pig. Love is this,” She said, gesturing into the emptiness between us. “The space between.” “There's space everywhere,” I growled, “between everyone.” “Don't be obtuse, Pyrre. It's the nature of the space that matters.”

LoveRelationshipsKillingLovingSpace Between
Book:Skullsworn
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