“Please, Lady Yin. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Tears dribbled down her cheek. “Please have mercy on me. If a man loses his tongue, at least he can read and write. But a woman without a tongue is no more than an animal!”

To be the judge of whether it is necessary for someone to die, one must love them first. But once there is love, it becomes very hard to still want them dead, does it not?

"Hesin," she asked me once, "why are women always expected to love those who would hurt us? To take care of those who would use us, however they please, without the slightest regard for whether we lived or died?"

She knew me then, at the beginning of ourselves, and she knew me now, here at the end, when she did not even know herself. [...] I couldn’t stop smiling—the euphoric, hysteric smile of a woman who has been lying on her lover’s grave and has just felt the earth move beneath her.

We learned, after the old world died, not to put our faith in wood pulp or motherboards; the only archive that survives is the one we carry with us.

The word home evoked only the sweet green smell of the woods, long gone, and sometimes another word: Yew, I thought, or perhaps you.

You are a great historian, Mallory, or you could have been. You know that history is mostly happenstance. Accidents piled on top of mistakes, a series of dice rolled in dim rooms by careless hands. It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it. And every story serves someone.

There are only two kinds of stories worth telling: the ones that send children to sleep, and the ones that send men to war.

I am not sure which I prefer: To be taken for something I am not, or to fail at being what I am.