Ninth House Quotes

Mors irrumat omnia. Death fucks us all.

I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me.

I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.

Her adept said: "I'll keep it off you. Nav, show them what the Ninth House does." Gideon lifted her sword. The construct worked itself free of its last confines of masonry and rotten wood and heaved before them, flexing itself like a butterfly. "We do bones, motherfucker," she said.

All you children playing with fire, looking surprised when the house burns down

That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you'd been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for.

I let you die. To save myself, I let you die. That is the danger in keeping company with survivors.

He needed her and she needed him. That was how most disasters began.

There were always excuses for why girls died

Not every flower belongs in every garden.

And maybe he wanted her to be the kind of girl who dressed as Queen Mab, who loved words and had stars in her blood.

Peace was like any high. It couldn't last. It was an illusion, something that could be interrupted in a moment and lost forever.

But would it have mattered if she’d been someone else? If she’d been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If she’d been a straight-A student, they would have said she’d been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.

They'd made the mistake of teaching him he could survive

I am a daughter of Lethe, and the wolves are at the door.

If Alex could have told Darlington anything, it would have been, Come back. She would have said it in English and Spanish. She would have used the imperative.

Take me back. Make me into someone who has never been done harm. Go as far as you can. Make me brand-new. No bruises. No scars.

We all have spaces we keep blank.

You couldn’t keep sidling up to death and dipping your toe in. Eventually it grabbed your ankle and tried to pull you under.

A lie isn't a lie until someone believes it. It doesn't matter how charming you are if there's no one to charm.

Maybe all rich people asked the wrong questions. For people like Alex, it would never be what do you want. It was always just how much can you get?

Darlington was a good talker, but he was happiest when no one was speaking to him, when he didn’t have to perform the ritual of himself and he could simply be left to watch others.

So I’m shut in here—walled in, really—to prevent the Nine Houses becoming none House, with left grief.

Only two things kept you safe: money and power.

You look ridiculous,” Wren said. “What?” “That shirt.” It was a Hello Kitty shirt from eighth or ninth grade. Hello Kitty dressed as a superhero. It said SUPER CAT on the back, and Wren had added an H with fabric paint. The shirt was cropped too short to begin with, and it didn’t really fit anymore. Cath pulled it down self-consciously. “Cath!” her dad shouted from downstairs. “Phone.” Cath picked up her cell phone and looked at it “He must mean the house phone,” Wren said. “Who calls the house phone?” “Probably 2005. I think it wants its shirt back.

Didn’t someone say love is a shared delusion?

Even alligators have parents, Dawes. That doesn't stop them from biting

What do you want?" Belbalm had asked her. Safety, comfort, to feel unafraid. I want to live to grow old, Alex thought as she pulled the curtains closed. I want to sit on my porch and drink foul-smelling tea and yell at passersby. I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me.

There was so much I should have told you. I just didn't have time. I didn't know. I didn't know I'd have to say: A sword doesn't hold an edge on its own, you sack of Ninth House garbage. I didn't know I'd have to say, if you dip a sword into melty bone, the metal gets more pitted than an iron mine, you cross-patched necromantic shit. I think the main thing I should have said was, You sawed open your skull rather than be beholden to someone. You turned your brain into soup to escape anything less than 100 percent freedom. You put me in a box and buried me rather than give up your own goddamned agenda. Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life and you didn't even want it. Actually, scratch that, the main thing I should have said was, SQUATS ARE A START, OR A COUPLE OF STAR JUMPS, THEY'RE NOT DIFFICULT.

I c-c-class p-p-profanity with declarations of love. Best used sparingly and only when wholeheartedly m-m-meant. -Darlington

It had bewildered her, back at Canaan House, how the whole of her always seemed to come back to Gideon. For one brief and beautiful space of time, she had welcomed it: that microcosm of eternity between forgiveness and the slow, uncomprehending agony of the fall. Gideon rolling up her shirt sleeves. Gideon dappled in shadow, breaking promises. One idiot with a sword and an asymmetrical smile had proved to be Harrow’s end: her apocalypse swifter than the death of the Emperor and the sun with him.

My name is Galaxy, you fucking glutton.

Harrow laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard Harrow really laugh. It was a rather weak and tired sound. "Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House," she said hoarsely, "you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph, The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.

All whiteboards are magical.

They tried to kill me, Hellie,” she rasped as she slid into the dark. That means I get to try to kill them.

Have power on this dark land to lighten it, and power on this dead world to make it live.

Do you know what my mother said?" Turner asked. "She told me there's no doorway the devil doesn't know. He's always waiting to stick his foot in. I never really believed her until tonight

If you were going to hell together, murder seemed like a good place to start.

Alex felt something dark inside her uncoil. “You’re a flat beast,” Hellie had once said to her. “Got a little viper lurking in there, ready to strike. A rattler probably.” She’d said it with a grin, but she’d been right.

This is where you belong. This is where you were meant to bloom. Don't roll your eyes, Galaxy. Not every flower belongs in every garden.

Alex watched in the mirror as her history spilled over her skin. The scars she had chosen for herself. We are the shepherds. The time for that was done. Better to be a rattler. Better to be a jackal.

She's sealed herself away from the world of the living, for the sake of being free of the dead.

Darlington liked to say that dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.

I'm not fucking dead," I said, which wasn't even true, and I was choking up; everything I'd ever done, everything I'd ever been through, and I was choking up. As the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the Necrolord Prime, stood from his chair to look at you-- at me; looked at your face, looked at my eyes in your face. It took, maybe, a million myriads. The static in your ears resolved into wordless screaming his expression was just--gently quizzical; mildly awed. "Hi, Not Fucking Dead," he said. "I'm Dad.

He didn't know how precious a normal life could be, how easy it was to drift away from average. You started sleeping until noon, skipped one class, one day of school, lost one job, then another, forgot the way that normal people did things. You lost the language of ordinary life. And then, without meaning to, you crossed into a country from which you couldn't return. You lived in a state where the ground always seemed to be slipping from beneath your feet, with no way back to someplace solid.

Alex slept in Darlington's bed and dreamed that he was curled behind her on the narrow mattress. He pulled her close, his fingers digging into her abdomen, and she could feel claws at their tips. He whispered in her ear, "I will serve you 'til the end of days." "And love me," she said with a laugh, bold in the dream, unafraid. But all he said was, "It is not the same.

If she died, her petty heart wanted to know who to haunt.

Psycho.” “So I hear,” said Alex. But crazy survived.

I pray the tomb is shut forever," recited Harrowhawk, with the curious fervidity she always showed in prayer. " I pray the rock is never rolled away. I pray that which was buried remains buried, insensate, in perpetual rest, with closed eye and stilled brain. I pray it lives, I pray it sleeps ... I pray for the needs of the Emperor All-Giving, the Undying King, His Virtues and his men. I pray for the Second House, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth; the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth. I pray for the Ninth House, and I pray for it to be fruitful. I pray for the soldiers and adepts far from home, and all those parts of the Empire that live in unrest and disquiet. Let it be so.

If you don't know a name," Darlington had explained, "you can't think it, and then you won't be tempted to say it." A name was a kind of intimacy.

Her map had been changed. Her coastline altered. Mors irrumat omnia. Death fucks us all.

Quien no sabe de mar no sabe de mal!

Because he doesn't want girls who want him. Because he grew weary of desire and developed a taste for causing shame. Alex didn't know what lived in boys like Blake, beautiful boys who should be happy. Who wanted for nothing but still found things to take.

This was why he had done it, not because of guilt or pride but because this was the moment he'd been waiting for: the chance to show someone else wonder, to watch them realize that they had not been lied to, that the world they'd been promised as children was not something that had to be abandoned...that everything was full of mystery.

Who are these people? Alex wondered. Who are these happy, frantic, funny people? How are they so unafraid?

You apologise to me?” she bellowed. “You apologise to me now? You say that you’re sorry when I have spent my life destroying you? You are my whipping girl! I hurt you because it was a relief! I exist because my parents killed everyone and relegated you to a life of abject misery, and they would have killed you too and not given it a second’s goddamned thought! I have spent your life trying to make you regret that you weren’t dead, all because—I regretted I wasn’t! I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that you’re sorry?” There were flecks of spittle on Harrowhark’s lips. She was retching for air. “I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.

There should be more magic. Not the creased-greasepaint performances of clowns and hack illusionists. Not card tricks. The magic he'd been promised would be found at the backs of wardrobes, under bridges, through mirrors. It was dangerous and alluring and it did not seek to entertain.

That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you’d been before life took away your belief in the possible.

Cautious was helpful; paranoid was just another word for distracted.

If she suddenly threw herself in a river or off a building or into traffic, there would be plenty of warning signs to point to. Did she seem depressed? She was distant. She didn’t make many friends. She was struggling in her classes. All true. But would it have mattered if she’d been someone else? If she’d been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If she’d been a straight-A student, they would have said she’d been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.

Magic had almost killed him, but in the end it had saved him. Just like in stories.

With each life I took, I soon saw a new temple raised to my glory - built by boys who never stopped to wonder at the power they claimed, only took it as their due. They toy with magic while I fashion immortality.

The purest Marxists are always men. Calamity comes too easily to women. Our lives can come apart in a single gesture, a rogue wave. And money? Money is the rock we cling to when the current would seize us.

All I can say is that it was complicated back in Canaan House, and sometimes a cute older girl shows you a lot of attention, because she’s bored or whatever, and you sort of have this maybe-flirting maybe-not thing going on, right, and then it turns out she’s an ancient warrior who’s killed all your friends and she’s coming for you, and then you both die and she turns up ages later in the broiling heat on a sacred space station and like, it’s complicated. Just saying that it happens all the time.

In the myriadic year of Our Lord--the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!--Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

Cuando ganeden esta acerrado, guehinam esta siempre abierto. While the Garden of Eden may be closed, Hell is always open.

She'd glimpsed true power and she knew it was her one chance to take it.

It was one thing to be a murderer, quite another to work for one.

I didn’t hurt her. I loved her.” Like those things couldn’t go hand in hand.

New Haven was a town forever on the brink of things.

once you have money, once you can stop clinging to the rock and can climb atop it, what will you build there? When you stand upon the rock, what will you preach?

he could never shake the thought that he was seeing only one world when there might be many, that there were lost places, maybe even lost people who might come to life for him if he just squinted hard enough or found the right magic words. Books, with their promises of enchanted doorways and secret places, only made it worse.

She'd never broken a bone, had surgery. But the worst damage didn't leave a mark. When Hellie died, it was as if someone had cut into Alex's chest, cracked her open like balsa wood. What if it really had been like that and she'd had to walk down the street bleeding, trying to hold her ribs together, her heart and her lungs and every part of her open to the world? Instead, the thing that had broken her had left no mark, no scar for her to point to and say, This is where I ended.

He shouldn't look. He knew that. You should never look into the face of the uncanny, but had he ever been able to turn way? No. He'd courted it, begged for it.

Turner rested his gloved hands on the steering wheel. “I'm pretty sure when my mother was talking about the devil, she had you in mind.” “I'm a delight.

Her eyes raced over us, counting. "So our son would be ninth in line, even though he's a boy? You never mentioned anything about this." His eyebrows furrowed. "I didn't realize I needed to.

Because people who can’t be bothered with manners pretend to be amused by them.

While the Garden of Eden may be closed, Hell is always open.

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garment green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic …

Darlington looked at her. Undine with her slick black hair, the center part like a naked spine, her devouring eyes.

Mirror magic is all about reflection and perception. A lie isn’t a lie until someone believes it. It doesn’t matter how charming you are if there’s no one to charm.

You mistake me Alexandra. There is no crime in wanting these things. Only people who have never lived without comfort deride it as bourgeois.“ She winked. “The purest Marxists are always men. Calamity comes too easily to women. Our lives can come apart in a single gesture, a rogue wave. And money? Money is the rock we cling to when the current would seize us.

Alex didn’t have money. But she did have power. She’d been afraid of it, afraid of staring directly at that blood-soaked night. Afraid she’d feel regret or shame, of saying goodbye to Hellie all over again. But when she’d finally looked? Let herself remember? Well, maybe there was something broken and shriveled in her, because she felt only a deep calm in knowing what she was capable of.

Suffocating beneath a pile of books seems an appropriate way to go for a research assistant.

Didn't someone say love is a shared delusion?" "Cynical, Darlington. Doesn't suit you at all." "Call it magic if you prefer. Two people reciting the same spell.

There are worse things than death, Miss Stern.

Turner twisted in his seat to give her a long stare. "You don't always have to come out swinging. What are you so angry at?" Alex felt an irritating jolt of embarrassment. "Everything." she muttered, gazing at the fogged-up windshield.

He’d told himself he was giving her a chance, being fair to this girl who had washed up on his shore. But he’d let himself think of her as someone who had made all of the wrong choices and stumbled down the wrong path. It hadn’t occurred to him that she was being chased.

His relief gusted through the room like a warm front, the kind that New Englanders welcome and that Angelenos know means wildfires.

...if there are such places, they remain opaque to us. Unknown and undiscovered. For there is no explorer so intrepid or daring that he would dare to walk the road to hell, no matter how it may be paved.

Harrow laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard Harrow really laugh. It was a rather weak and tired sound. "Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House," she said hoarsely, "you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph, The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.

Alex smiled then, a small thing, a glimpse of the girl lurking inside her, a happy, less haunted girl. That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you'd been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for. That was what Lethe had done for him. Maybe it could do that for Alex as well.

You shouldn’t be ashamed to be different,” her mother had said when Alex had summoned the courage to ask for the name change. “I called you Galaxy for a reason.” Alex didn’t disagree. Most of the books she read and the TV shows she watched told her different was okay. Different was great! Except no one was different quite like her.

Her gaze turned distant. 'Have you ever heard of the arsenic eaters?' Alex blinked, confused. 'No?' 'They would ingest a little bit of arsenic every day. It made their skin clear and their eyes bright and they felt wonderful. And all the while they were just drinking poison.' When Mira turned her eyes back to Alex, they were sharper and steadier than Alex ever remembered them being, free of the usual determined cheer. 'That's what being with your father was like.

This was why he had done it, not because of guilt or pride but because this was the moment he'd been waiting for: the chance to show someone else wonder, to watch them realize that they had not been lied to, that the world they'd been promised as children was not something that had to be abandoned, that there really was something lurking in the wood, beneath the stairs, between the stars, that everything was full of mystery.

From my blood and bone and vomit I conjured up a beautiful labyrinth to house you in. I was terrified you’d find some way to escape before I was done. I made you look like a Christmas-tree fairy … I made you look like a Renaissance angel … I made you Adam and Eve … Galatea. Barbie. Frankenstein’s monster with long yellow hair.. As the world went up I remade us both. I hid me in you … I hid you in me. And when we were together … once the shaman had claimed the sun … I became God.

Here,” she said. She pulled the shirt over her head, revealing a black bra and ribs shadowed like the furrows of a tilled field. “Don't get Dawes.” Why was she so willing to put herself in his hands? Was she unafraid or just reckless? Neither trait boded well for her future at Lethe. But he had the sense it was neither of those things. It felt like she was testing him now, like she'd laid down another challenge. “Some propriety wouldn't kill you,” he said. “Why take the chance?” “Usually when a woman takes her clothes off in front of me I have some warning.” Alex shrugged, and the shadows moved over her skin. “Next time, I'll light the signal fires.” “That would be best.

In the mirror, he saw himself, a knight with bowed head, offering his service, a sword in his hand, a sword in his back. He felt no pain, only the ache in his heart. Choose me. There were tears on his cheeks, even as he felt the shame of it. She was no one, a girl who had lucked into a gift, who had done nothing to earn it. She was his queen. "Darlington," she said. But that was not his true name any more than Alex was hers. If only she would choose him. If only she would let him... She touched her fingers to his face, lifted his chin. Her lips brushed his ear. He didn't understand it. He only wanted her to do it again. Stars poured through him, a cold and billowing wave of night. He saw everything. He saw their bodies entwined. She was above him and beneath him all at once, her body splayed and white as a lotus flower.

Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the family quite poor. Her mother helps out by driving a school bus part-time, in addition to taking care of her two younger siblings. The girl lives with her family in a small house, a winterized former summer cabin, while most of her classmates live in large suburban homes. How is this girl to understand her poverty? Since history textbooks present the American past as four hundred years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps.

Put it on record --I am an Arab And the number of my card is fifty thousand I have eight children And the ninth is due after summer. What's there to be angry about? Put it on record. --I am an Arab Working with comrades of toil in a quarry. I have eight childern For them I wrest the loaf of bread, The clothes and exercise books From the rocks And beg for no alms at your doors, --Lower not myself at your doorstep. --What's there to be angry about? Put it on record. --I am an Arab. I am a name without a tide, Patient in a country where everything Lives in a whirlpool of anger. --My roots --Took hold before the birth of time --Before the burgeoning of the ages, --Before cypess and olive trees, --Before the proliferation of weeds. My father is from the family of the plough --Not from highborn nobles. And my grandfather was a peasant --Without line or genealogy. My house is a watchman's hut --Made of sticks and reeds. Does my status satisfy you? --I am a name without a surname. Put it on Record. --I am an Arab. Color of hair: jet black. Color of eyes: brown. My distinguishing features: --On my head the 'iqal cords over a keffiyeh --Scratching him who touches it. My address: --I'm from a village, remote, forgotten, --Its streets without name --And all its men in the fields and quarry. --What's there to be angry about? Put it on record. --I am an Arab. You stole my forefathers' vineyards --And land I used to till, --I and all my childern, --And you left us and all my grandchildren --Nothing but these rocks. --Will your government be taking them too --As is being said? So! --Put it on record at the top of page one: --I don't hate people, --I trespass on no one's property. And yet, if I were to become starved --I shall eat the flesh of my usurper. --Beware, beware of my starvation. --And of my anger!