Quotes from Blood of Tyrants

Naomi Novik ·  432 pages

Rating: (7K votes)


“It is not as though we have not heard of you, Captain Laurence. We have all had a great many arguments, whether your aid would not be too expensive, to begin with.”

“Sir,” Laurence said, now baffled, “I beg your pardon; however should you know me from Adam?”

“If the world had not heard of you, after your adventure at Gdansk,” Kutuzov said, meaning Danzig, where they had rescued the garrison from the wreck of the Prussian campaign, “or after the plague, we should certainly have heard of you after Brazil. Where you go, you leave half the world overturned behind you. You are more dangerous than Bonaparte in your own way, you and that beast of yours.”
― Naomi Novik, quote from Blood of Tyrants


“The water-dragon’s name was Lady Kiyomizu, although much to Junichiro’s horror she breezily told Laurence to call her Kiyo, and not to stand on formality. “You have no manners anyway,” she said, “and there is no sense your trying to put out sakura blossoms, when you are a bamboo.”
― Naomi Novik, quote from Blood of Tyrants


“The passageway smelled of smoke: burning wood, a torch, acrid. His head ached. Blood was wet and sticky upon his arm and on his fingers, and the orange glow of torchlight played from behind his back and over the corridor walls, leaping like a bonfire. There was a strange familiarity to it: the narrow walls in around him. And when he came to a wooden door set in the wall, he put his hand upon it and pushed it open.

There was a room, and a pallet inside it; a small torch burned low in a socket upon the wall. A man lay upon the cot, his face bruised and battered, his hands curled against his chest bloody: and Laurence knew him; knew him and knew himself. He remembered another door opening, in Bristol, three years before, and a voice asking him to come outside his prison, in a Britain under siege.

“Tenzing,” Laurence said, and, as Tharkay opened feverish eyes, went to help him stand.”
― Naomi Novik, quote from Blood of Tyrants


“The river flows to the sea, whatever the wind says about it”
― Naomi Novik, quote from Blood of Tyrants


“... there is no sense your trying to put out sakura blossoms, when you are a bamboo.”
― Naomi Novik, quote from Blood of Tyrants



“I am of the opinion", Tharkay said, "that you ought not assign to free will something more likely the consequence of a sharp blow to the skull.”
― Naomi Novik, quote from Blood of Tyrants


About the author

Naomi Novik
Born place: New York, The United States
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