Fonda Lee

“Nothing good’s coming, when the dogs start disappearing from the streets.”

a single step in one direction might portend an irrevocable change in one’s path

A man who wears the crown of a king can’t wear the jade of a warrior. Gold and jade, never together.

“Betrayal, murder, and war have a way of ruining one’s plans.”

The gods were often cruel, everyone knew that.

It’s not true that the dead don’t care, Shae thought. You owe the dead.

It was the way of all things, to live and die at the whim of more powerful creatures

There’s a way to discipline a man so he hates you forever, and another way to do it so he loves you all the more for it. To know what it is, you have to know the man.

“People are like horses, Andy. Fingers and Fists too—everyone. Any old horse will run when it’s whipped, but only fast enough to avoid the whipping,” Hilo said. “Racehorses, though, they run because they look at the horse on their left, they look at the one on their right, and they think, No way am I second to these fuckers.”

“Sometimes, Andy, the people you think you can count on, they let you down in a bad way, and that’s hard to take. But for the most part, you give a man something to live up to, you tell him he can be more than he is now, more than other people think he’ll ever be, and he’ll try his godsdamned best to make it true.”