Golden Son — Book Review & Quotes
Quotes
“Home isn’t where you’re from, it’s where you find light when all grows dark.”
“Friendships take minutes to make, moments to break, years to repair.”
“I will die. You will die. We will all die and the universe will carry on without care. All that we have is that shout into the wind — how we live. How we go. And how we stand before we fall.”
“Liars make the best promises.”
“Wise men read books about history. Strong men write them.”
“It’s not victory that makes a man. It’s his defeats.”
“He always thinks because I’m reading, I’m not doing anything. There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extroverted.”
“Hic sunt leones. Here be lions.”
“Rise so high, in mud you lie.”
“For seven hundred years, my people have been enslaved without voice, without hope. Now I am their sword. And I do not forgive. I do not forget. So let him lead me onto his shuttle. Let him think he owns me. Let him welcome me into his house, so I might burn it down.”
“They say a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. They made no mention of the heart.”
“Everyone’s honest till they’re caught in a lie.”
“We are not our station in life. We are us — the sum of what we’ve done, what we want to do, and the people who we keep close.”
“A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.”
“You meet a man, you know him. You meet a woman, she knows you.”
“If you’re a fox, play the hare. If you’re the hare, play the fox.”
“And what is the bloodydamn point of surviving in this cold world if I run from the only warmth it has to offer?”
“In a storm, you don’t tie two boats together. They’ll drag each other down.”
“Tradition is the crown of the tyrant.”
“Do you ever feel lost?” The question hangs between us, intimate, awkward only on my end. He doesn’t scoff as Tactus and Fitchner would, or scratch his balls like Sevro, or chuckle like Cassius might have, or purr as Victra would. I’m not sure what Mustang might have done. But Roque, despite his Color and all the things that make him different, slowly slides a marker into the book and sets it on the nightstand beside the four-poster, taking his time and allowing an answer to evolve between us. Movements thoughtful and organic, like Dancer’s were before he died. There’s a stillness in him, vast and majestic, the same stillness I remember in my father. “Quinn once told me a story.” He waits for me to moan a grievance at the mention of a story, and when I don’t, his tone sinks into deeper gravity. “Once, in the days of Old Earth, there were two pigeons who were greatly in love. In those days, they raised such animals to carry messages across great distances. These two were born in the same cage, raised by the same man, and sold on the same day to different men on the eve of a great war. “The pigeons suffered apart from each other, each incomplete without their lover. Far and wide their masters took them, and the pigeons feared they would never again find each other, for they began to see how vast the world was, and how terrible the things in it. For months and months, they carried messages for their masters, flying over battle lines, through the air over men who killed one another for land. When the war ended, the pigeons were set free by their masters. But neither knew where to go, neither knew what to do, so each flew home. And there they found each other again, as they were always destined to return home and find, instead of the past, their future.”
“I didn’t mind that it was always about you, Darrow. That was what burned Tactus, but not me. I’m not in love with you like Mustang. I don’t worship you like Sevro or the Howlers. I was a true friend. I was someone who saw your light and your dark and accepted both without judgement, without agenda…”
“You are but a mortal,” Roque whispers in my ear, riding his horse alongside the chariot, as per tradition.
“And a whorefart,” Servo calls from the other side.
“Yes,” Roque agrees solemnly. “That too.”
“We’re all just wounded souls stumbling about in the dark, desperately trying to stitch ourselves together, hoping to fill the holes they ripped in us.”
“Sometimes I wonder if he were raised a Red and I a Gold if he wouldn’t have ended up a better man than I am now, and I a worse man than he ever could be. For some reason I think I could have been capable of great evil.”
“To free them, to protect them, we must be savages. So give me evil. Give me darkness. Make me the bloodydamn devil if we can bring even the faintest ray of light.”
“In another life, you would have been one of my sons, Darrow. I would have found you earlier, before whatever happened that filled you with this rage. I would not have raised you to be a great man. There is no peace for great men. I would have had you be a decent one. I would have given you the quiet strength to grow old with the woman you love.”
“I try to kill him in my heart before I kill him in the flesh.”
“How cruel a life, that the sight of my dead wife means hope.”
“You will fall to ruin because you believe that exceptions to the rule make new rules.”
“Tell all who will hear, the Reaper sails to Mars. And he calls for an Iron Rain.”
“That’s what Society does — spread the blame so there is no villain, so it’s futile to even begin to find a villain, to find justice. It’s just machinery. Processes.”
“I hate how my body shivers at the idea of glory. There’s something deep in man that hungers for this. But I think it weakness, not strength, to abandon decency for that strange darker spirit.”
“Modern war is fearing the air, the shadows, fearing the silence. Death will come and I won’t even see it.”
“There is no morality to him. No goodness. No evil intent when he killed Eo. He believes he is beyond morality. His aspirations are so grand that he has become inhuman in his desperate desire to preserve humanity.”
“Humanity came out of hell, Darrow. Gold did not rise out of chance. We rose out of necessity. Out of chaos, born from a species that devoured its planet instead of investing in the future. Pleasure over all, damn the consequences. The brightest minds enslaved to an economy that demanded toys instead of space exploration or technologies that could revolutionize our race. They created robots, neutering the work ethic of mankind, creating generations of entitled locusts. Countries hoarded their resources, suspicious of one another. There grew to be twenty different factions with nuclear weapons. Twenty — each ruled by greed or zealotry. “So when we conquered mankind, it wasn’t for greed. It wasn’t for glory. It was to save our race. It was to still the chaos, to create order, to sharpen mankind to one purpose — ensuring our future. The Colors are the spine of that aim. Allow the hierarchies to shift and the order begins to crumble. Mankind will not aspire to be great. Men will aspire to be great.”
“To prosper, your superior must prosper.”
“I am not some frill-wearing tramp. I am a genius. I say this because it is a fact. I am smarter than any person you’ve ever met, except perhaps my twin.”
“You taught me once, Lorn. I’m a better man for it. But now it’s my turn to teach you. Men can change. Sometimes they have to fall. Sometimes they have to leap.”
“Would that my hands were meant to build. I would know what to say. What to do. Maybe in another life I would have been that man. In this one, my words, like my hands, are clumsy. All they can do is cut. All they can do is break.”
“Slaves do not have the bravery of free men.”
“In a world of killers, it takes more to be kind than to be wicked. But men like you and me, we’re just passing time before death reaches down for us.”
“Pride is just a shout into the wind.”
“Because in the end, what does all the power in all the worlds matter if your closest friends can betray you?”
“An eerie feeling, a notion that devils roam the grounds instead of men. Who knows what anyone will do now that the rules are gone?”
