Quotes from A Torch Against the Night

“So long as you fight the darkness, you stand in the light.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Your emotions make you human. Even the unpleasant ones have a purpose. Don't lock them away. If you ignore them, they just get louder and angrier.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Failure doesn't define you. It's what you do after you fail that determines whether you are a leader or a waste of perfectly good air.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“But you, Helene Aquilla, are no swift-burning spark. You are a torch against the night - if you dare to let yourself burn.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“It takes only a split second for life to go horribly wrong. To fix the mess, I need a thousand things to go right. The distance from one bit of luck to the next feels as great as the distance across oceans. But, I decide in this moment, I will bridge that distance, again and again, until I win. I will not fail.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Perhaps I have become so accustomed to the burden of secrets that I do not notice their weight until I am free of it.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Don't lock yourself away from those who care about you because you think you'll hurt them or they'll hurt you. What point is there in being human if you don't let yourself feel anything?”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Fools pay attention to words in a fight. Warriors take advantage of them.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Elias and Laia are each other’s countermelodies. I am just a dissonant note.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Don't look so worried. Most successful missions are just a series of barely averted disasters.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Laia is curled in a ball on the other, one hand on her armlet, fast asleep.
"You are my temple", I murmur as I knee beside her. "You are my priest. You are my prayer. You are my release."- Elias”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Children are born to break their mothers’ hearts, my boy.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“True suffering lies in the expectation of pain as much as in the pain itself.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Perhaps grief is like battle: After experiencing enough of it, your body’s instincts take over. When you see it closing in like a Martial death squad, you harden your insides. You prepare for the agony of a shredded heart. And when it hits, it hurts, but not as badly, because you have locked away your weakness, and all that’s left is anger and strength.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“The rest is just wishes and hope, the most fragile of things.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Failure doesn’t define you. It’s what you do after you fail that determines whether you are a leader or a waste of perfectly good air.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“So you've made a few bad decisions. So have I. So has Elias. So has everyone attempting to do something difficult. That doesn't mean that you give up, you fool. Do you understand?”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“She chuckles again. “Because sane plans never work, girl,” she says. “Only the mad ones do.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Mercy is weakness. Offer it to your enemies and you might as well fall upon your own sword.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Willpower alone cannot change one’s fate.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Secrets are a snake’s way of doing business.” “And snakes survive,”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Veturius is a Mask like the rest of us, yes. Bold, brave, strong, swift. But those were afterthoughts for him. Elias sees people as they should be, not as they are. He laughs at himself. He gives of himself - in everything he does. [...] He's the things that I can't be. He's good.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“You fool, Helene. When you love, there is always more pain.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“So long as you fight in the darkness, you stand in the light.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“Family is worth dying for, killing for. Fighting for them is all that keeps us going when everything else is gone.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“You are my priest. You are my prayer. You are my release.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“I thought you told me you loved stories Have you ever heard a story of an adventurer with a sane plan?"

"Well... no."

"And why do you think that is?"

I am at loss. "Because... ah, because—"

She chuckles again. "Because sane plans never work girl," she says. "Only the mad ones do.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

“If your sins were blood, child, you would drown in a river of your own making.”
― Sabaa Tahir, quote from A Torch Against the Night

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“A film, The Lost Continent, throws a clear light on the current myth of exoticism. It is a big documentary on 'the East', the pretext of which is some undefined ethnographic expedition, evidently false, incidentally, led by three or four Italians into the Malay archipelago. The film is euphoric, everything in it is easy, innocent. Our explorers are good fellows, who fill up their leisure time with child-like amusements: they play with their mascot, a little bear (a mascot is indispensable in all expeditions: no film about the polar region is without its tame seal, no documentary on the tropics is without its monkey), or they comically upset a dish of spaghetti on the deck. Which means that these good people, anthropologists though they are, don't bother much with historical or sociological problems. Penetrating the Orient never means more for them than a little trip in a boat, on an azure sea, in an essentially sunny country. And this same Orient which has today become the political centre of the world we see here all flattened, made smooth and gaudily coloured like an old-fashioned postcard.
The device which produces irresponsibility is clear: colouring the world is always a means of denying it (and perhaps one should at this point begin an inquiry into the use of colour in the cinema). Deprived of all substance, driven back into colour, disembodied through the very glamour of the 'images', the Orient is ready for the spiriting away which the film has in store for it. What with the bear as a mascot and the droll spaghetti, our studio anthropologists will have no trouble in postulating an Orient which is exotic in form, while being in reality profoundly similar to the Occident, at least the Occident of spiritualist thought. Orientals have religions of their own? Never mind, these variations matter very little compared to the basic unity of idealism. Every rite is thus made at once specific and eternal, promoted at one stroke into a piquant spectacle and a quasi-Christian symbol.
...If we are concerned with fisherman, it is not the type of fishing which is whown; but rather, drowned in a garish sunset and eternalized, a romantic essense of the fisherman, presented not as a workman dependent by his technique and his gains on a definite society, but rather as the theme of an eternal condition, in which man is far away and exposed to the perils of the sea, and woman weeping and praying at home. The same applies to refugees, a long procession of which is shown at the beginning, coming down a mountain: to identify them is of course unnecessary: they are eternal essences of refugees, which it is in the nature of the East to produce.”
― Roland Barthes, quote from Mythologies

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