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Quote by Naomi Novik

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His Majesty's Dragon

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Author

Naomi Novik
Naomi Novik

Naomi Novik is a British writer renowned for her historical fantasy novels. Her most famous work is the 'Temeraire' series, which tells the story of an officer and his dragon's adventures during the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th century. more

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“I cannot see why all men are not friends below. The identity of your weaknesses and misfortunes, the need that you have one for another, the shortness of your lives, the spectacle of the infinite greatness of the spheres, and the comparison of these with your own littleness, all ought to unite you fraternally, as voyagers threatened with shipwreck.”

“The twenty-first century physicist Carlo Rovelli theorized that quantum mechanics was, fundamentally, about relationships. That no element of nature exists alone. Everything acts and is acted upon in turn. A minuscule electron jumping an orbit can change an entire element or cause a chain reaction that leads to devastation. But without such reactions, there would be no universe at all. There would be no stars, no sun, no planets, no living creatures, no way of even knowing about such things as quantum mechanics. Isn't it beautiful that the underlying theory of our entire universe is predicated on the ways the smallest particles relate to each other? We collided in a sea of endless shifting probabilities.”

“Stephen was honourable and courageous; she was steadfast in friendship and selfless in loving; intolerable to think that her only companions must be men and women like Jonathan Brockett—and yet—after all what else? What remained? Loneliness, or worse still, far worse because it so deeply degraded the spirit, a life of perpetual subterfuge, of guarded opinions and guarded actions, of lies of omission if not of speech, of becoming an accomplice in the world's injustice by maintaining at all times a judicious silence, making and keeping the friends one respected, on false pretences, because if they knew they would turn aside, even the friends one respected.”

“It would have been too melodramatic, too final, to say that after this JB was forever diminished for him. But it was true that for the first time, he was able to comprehend that the people he had grown to trust might someday betray him anyway, and that as disappointing as it might be, it was inevitable as well, and that life would keep propelling him steadily forward, because for everyone who might fail him in some way, there was at least one person who never would.”