Babylonia

Women are at war every day of their lives because they’re expendable,

Lonely souls rarely find each other, but when they do, they aren’t meant to part.

But happiness is a liar, for it makes us believe it will last forever, when it never does.

I will marry you,” she says. Around them, the sun meets the land, coloring the sky with a thousand shades. Thus my old life dies, she thinks. Let a new one be born.

Can we grasp the instant when our fate turns? Or can we understand it only later, once the moment grows into a memory?

When she was a child, it was her greatest wish to have someone who loved her so much that he would protect her from any danger. But life wasn’t kind to her, so she became that person for herself.

People usually believe that wisdom and knowledge can be learned, but people are fools. It is strength that can be learned. One either has understanding or one doesn’t.

Semiramis does not pray. She looks at the sky and makes promises. She promises she will be bold and fearless. As luminous as a star and as raging as a lion.

The woman arrayed in purple and gold, with a cup in her hand full of lust and faults, will be as great as Babylon, the glowing city which reigns over the kings of the earth.

Common people are always unkind to those who are different. They insult them because they do not understand them.

You can’t give a man the feeling of being understood, then snatch it away from him: he’ll spend the rest of his life searching.

Excitement blossoms inside her, like a tree in spring. A change is coming, and while every other villager might be scared of it, to her it tastes like hope.

He thinks both of them have been drowning. But rather than fight the storm together, they have lost each other at sea.

Things that are lost aren't meant to be found again. We must let them go.

Power changes men, and not for the better or kings and soldiers wouldn't be so merciless. And on such power the world is built: gods and kings at the top, who are bound to no will but their own., then governors and courtiers, then soldiers and so on, until, at the bottom, common people such as herself. All commoners can do is pray and worship, gaining favors with loyalty and adulation. And, of course, subdue those even smaller and weaker than they are.

Desire is a strange thing. What makes us want one person over another? Is it the memory of the past, the excitement of the present, or the promise of the future?

A betrayal isn’t only a broken promise. It is also a word

Do not fall in love. A woman is a pitfall

The hammer shatters glass but forges steel.

She knows that she cannot mend him, for she has never managed to mend herself. But isn’t it always easier when the pain is someone else’s?

it is dark, the palace sleeps, and the night belongs to the slaves. A momentary change in the order of things. The seeds of freedom, bursting from the earth before they are buried again.

You have come here with hopes, Semiramis, I am sure of it,” she says. “But hopes are not so different from dreams: both are as far from real life as the house of dust is from the world of the living.

You are wise or a fool. I often find it hard to tell the difference.” “Wise men live. Fools die,

She wonders if he is truly warning her, and if he is, why he would do such a thing. “You haven’t been stabbed yet.” He lifts a dark, fine brow. “I understand the way the game is played.

Her glowing future unfolds, but she never forgets her past. It is written on her skin, and to cut it away would mean losing a part of herself. A part that, no matter how much she denies it, will always be there.

She listens to make sense of this world, to give it a shape so she can inhabit it.

like sheep… My prancing steeds plunged into their welling blood as into a river; the wheels of battle chariots were bespattered with blood and filth. I filled the plain with corpses of their warriors like herbage.” These are some of the lines that inspired the scene

They are close, two people who have avoided intimacy all their lives. A man made of coldness and a girl who slips into the shadows like a thief.

In this world of fiddlers, he needed an ally. I will be that and much more.

The hammer shatters glass but forges steel. I’ve known a lot of men in my life who are glass. But you are different.