Descendant Of The Crane Quotes

What is truth? Scholars seek it. Poets write it. Good Kings pay gold to hear it. But in trying times, truth is the first thing we betray.

On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.

If you want to understand a person, peer at his heart through the window of his prejudices and assumptions.

Equality is not the natural way of the world, whispered her father's voice. It must be nurtured.

Missing some people was like missing air. You did yourself no favors by wondering how you survived without them.

You can't possibly touch all the lives in this world. But if you can lift someone with your two hands, that is enough.

O sleepless as the river under thee, / Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod, / Onto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend / And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

No night was perfect for treason, but this one came close.

This fate had chosen her. It was only now, seventeen years later, that she chose it back.

Anger is a form of confidence - a hope that the ones we admire will change for the better.

To learn, her mind had needed to unlearn.

Knowledge is truth, Little Bird. Those who refuse to learn live in a world of falsity.

Her, against a seasoned court. Her, against the tides of war. Her, against the king's assassin.

I could not recall the last time I had been so flagrantly insulted. Don't make enemies, I told myself. Swallow your pride. Hold your tongue. But the fact was, I had real difficulty with those particular virtues.

I had reason to be wary of Rowan Gresham. Crazy doesn't always look crazy. Sometimes it looks like the most handsome and refined gentleman ever encountered in one's short life.

Passage 3.4.2: 'Justice is a muscle. Without faith it weakens. Without use, it decays. Without challenges it does not strengthen.

There were no simple questions, or simple answers, Hesina decided bitterly. There were only truths sacrificed for other truths.

He drove into the spewing smoke of acres of burning truck tires and the planes descended and the transit cranes stood in rows at the marine terminal and he saw billboards for Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays--all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality...

Before Charlotte could utter a syllable, Tristan picked up her gloved hand and kissed her lightly on the knuckles. “Good day, Charlotte,” he said. “Good day,” she answered. She turned to bid farewell to Lady Rosalind, but she seemed to have disappeared. Numbly, she descended the front steps toward a waiting Rothbury, who only had eyes for the Devines’ front door, looking quite like he wanted to murder someone. “Perfection, dear brother,” Rosalind proclaimed, while peeking out the little window next to the door. “Utter perfection.” Slipping a finger inside his cravat to loosen it a bit, Tristan craned his neck from side to side, easing the building tension. “If he kills me, I’ll see to it that you get hanged for murder as well.

What is power? Hesina had thought it was wielding the knife, or getting someone to wield it for her. Now she realized it was neither. Power was yielding. It was taking the bloodstained knife out of a thousand frenzied hands and making it hers alone.

At his words not my body, but my soul bucked, decimating barriers that until then had been untouched.

You don't owe the people some better version of yourself. In fact, you owe this world nothing.

Memories are short. History plays out in cycles. Tables turn; the sufferers rise and make their oppressors suffer. This is simply human nature.

The best way of controlling a person is by reading his heart. And the clearest window to any heart is prejudice and assumption.

She didn't mind that he blamed her, or that they only knew how to make each other whole when they were broken. For once, she didn't want anything more than just to hold him.

The mind is a timeless teacher . . . And the heart. The past must be filtered through both to mean anything in the present.

Thud. Her father was immortal. Thud. The face she’d known all her life was a lie, aged forward by a sooth. Thud. How? Thud. How? Thud. Thud. Thud.

In the times ahead, you may not know whom to trust. So trust in yourself, and trust in your beliefs.

I taught her to love the truth. You taught her to love learning. Your sister taught her to fight for what is right. Her mother taught her the pain of not being accepted for something she can't control.

Then let's have a demonstration." Akira gestured for a page. "I never expected you to take me seriously," said the same marquis who'd invoked the imperial troupe. Akira scratched his head. "Would you prefer to be taken as a joke next time?

Isn’t it amazing the effect on one’s perspective that can be made by a glass of wine and a moment’s peace?” he asked. I rather thought that it was amazing the effect one glass of wine and one grumpy old dude could have on my libido, but no way was I telling him that.

But tonight, Hesina let herself miss her father. She missed him. She missed him a lot. As the distant chords flowed into their little clearing, winding with the strings of her heart, she imagined herself riding on a chariot to face the Kendi'an Crown Prince. And later, when she slept, she dreamed she died, but her father read her back to life, and together they flew to the lunar palace on the backs of their giant cranes.

Anger is a form of confidence . . . . A hope that the ones we admire will change for the better.

Ever since taking over command of the Yan militia at the tender age of fourteen,

Her father had gifted her this pin as he’d gifted his love: from the moment of her birth, when her hands had been too small to grasp its form.

With a twist of unease, Hesina sank against the pillows at her back. “It was never fine. The Eleven freed the oppressed by oppressing their oppressors.

It should have healed without a scar. But no queen had time to apply tiger balm twice a day, and a bumpy seam of new skin gleamed under the lantern light.

So breathe. And again. And again, until you forget you are deliberately breathing. Search until you forget you are deliberately searching.

She raised a hand, struggling to reach Hesina’s cheek. “Promise… you’ll finish this… in style.

Knowledge is truth, Little Bird. Those who refuse to learn live in a world of falsity.

She wasn't good at much. A long, long time ago, she thought she had a knack for acting. She took to lying, and she preferred living in someone else's skin as opposed to her own. But nothing squelched childish dreams quite like inheriting the throne. Learning to rule was an all-consuming pastime.

Saying good-bye to Ben is Sarina's least favorite activity. So sad the number of times she's had to do it. Ball games, recitals, the homes of friends, rented shore houses, through car windows after dropping off some forgotten camera to Annie. Goodbye. See you later. Nice seeing you. She has mastered it: A dismissive peck on the cheek. A hug like an afterthought. Telling herself, Do not watch him walk away. Watching him walk away. Watching him drive away. Watching him descend the stairs to the subway. How many times have they said goodbye to each other? Already tonight, twice. He interrupts her before she can get the second goodbye out. "How would you feel," he says, "about missing your train?" Once at the beach, Sarina watched a crane bathing in a gully at dusk. It used its wings to funnel the water over its back, then shook out the excess in a firework of droplets. After several minutes it took off, arcing out over the fretless sea. That felt like this.

Out of some far recess of the sky a tinkling of little bells falls soft upon the listening land. Then again silence. Now comes a baying of some sweet-throated hound, soon the clamor of a responding back. Then a far clear blast of hunting horns, out of the sky into the fog. High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks , and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.

Shirt" The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, The nearly invisible stitches along the collar Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break Or talking money or politics while one fitted This armpiece with its overseam to the band Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. One hundred and forty-six died in the flames On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes— The witness in a building across the street Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step Up to the windowsill, then held her out Away from the masonry wall and let her drop. And then another. As if he were helping them up To enter a streetcar, and not eternity. A third before he dropped her put her arms Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down, Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers— Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.” Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks, Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian, To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor, Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers To wear among the dusty clattering looms. Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader, The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields: George Herbert, your descendant is a Black Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit And feel and its clean smell have satisfied Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality Down to the buttons of simulated bone, The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape, The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

unbelievable' is just due to a prosaic bent in the mind of beholder.

Let me guess. Hmmm. Mocha. Nonfat. Covered with whipped cream.” “That’s exactly right. How did you know?” I supposed he could add mind reader to his growing list of useful talents. “A lucky guess. Would you settle for vanilla, though? The nonfat and whipped cream I have covered, but even this tan would never qualify as ‘mocha’.

After a time skin sags; appearance fades,” a favorite professor told me on my twenty-first birthday. “Look deeper,” she said.

I follow the ancient sound of cranes returning at dusk, the great flights descending, coming in after the day of gathering energy from the cornfields, this wild, ancient ritual repeated here before me in a world gone so crazy and broken and out of control. All these birds that have moved across the continent longer than any other, that predate anything we have done, are here still alive.