Top 80 Seth Dickinson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Tired of doing hurt, and tired of taking it. Tired of the great cartographic project. Isn’t it a little like cartography? Meeting lovely people, mapping them, racing to find their hurts before they can find yours – getting use from them, squeezing them dry, and then striking first, unilaterally and with awful effect, because the alternative is waiting for them to do the same to you. These are the rules, you didn’t make them, they’re not your fault. So you might as well play to win.”

— Seth Dickinson

52. “Trust, like money, needed a guarantee to back it.”

— Seth Dickinson

53. “Cowards. How dare they be content. If they were real they would have suffered as she had.”

— Seth Dickinson

54. “But that’s a comfort, isn’t it? That’s enough. The story’s still here. We go on.”

— Seth Dickinson

55. “She accepts the world as it is and the world accepts her thus. She is not mastered. What is done to her cannot confine what she will do.”

— Seth Dickinson

56. “The sword kills,” Baru recited, trying to remember the Handbook of Manumission, its arguments for revolutionary zeal. “But the arm moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath to duty, and that duty moves the mind, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless.”

— Seth Dickinson

57. “She moved and spoke decisively, sometimes with a certain impatience, as if the world dragged two steps behind her will and she found the friction grating.”

— Seth Dickinson

58. “Do not do her work for her. Do not build her up in your mind. She’s only one woman.”

— Seth Dickinson

59. “That old sick joy, her first and favorite drug. Control.”

— Seth Dickinson

60. “It’s not what the Masquerade does to you that you should you fear, she wanted to tell Ake. It’s what the Masquerade convinces you to do to yourself.”

— Seth Dickinson

61. “I am a part of this, but I do not have to love it. I only have to play my role. Survive long enough to gather power. Gather enough power to make a difference.”

— Seth Dickinson

62. “With the discipline of the body comes discipline of the soul.”

— Seth Dickinson

63. “Look at Tain Shir and you cannot fathom the name behind the cartouche. You cannot extract her reasons. You only see why men turn to religion: for hope that there are gods to oppose her.”

— Seth Dickinson

64. “Oh, it wasn’t fair! Of course the world could be cruel, but couldn’t it at least be equitable in its cruelty? If you gave up your soul, if you abandoned those you loved to secure a greater freedom, weren’t you owed a reward?”

— Seth Dickinson

65. “She was powerless without her patrons. Could power be real if someone else gave it to you?”

— Seth Dickinson

66. “Everyone was someone else’s instrument.”

— Seth Dickinson

67. “The Hierarchic Qualm: The sword kills. But the arm moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath to duty, and that duty moves the mind, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless.”

— Seth Dickinson

68. “The school’s Charitable Service instructors came from many foreign places. There were more and stranger people among the Masquerade garrison than Baru had ever seen at Iriad market. “If they can be teachers,” Baru asked, “then I can be one, too? I can go to another land and make little girls stop reading at unjustly early hours?”

— Seth Dickinson

69. “She looked that word up too, hoping to understand it, as understanding gave her power over things.”

— Seth Dickinson

70. “Trim will save us and trim is only other people.”

— Seth Dickinson

71. “The Fairer Hand,” she intoned, and setting her blade flat across her knee, she knelt. “This is my vow: in life, in death, I am yours.” “You will be my field-general.” Baru reached down to draw her up, and Tain Hu took her hand to rise, glove in glove, her grip fierce, her eyes golden. “Choose your captains and lieutenants.”

— Seth Dickinson

72. “You cannot destroy the masters by mastering them. You destroy them by destroying.”

— Seth Dickinson

73. “She sat in the dark and fell through the hollow of herself for a time.”

— Seth Dickinson

74. “I called on one sword,” she said. “When offered the quiver, I always chose the same arrow. I put the harshest weight on a single back. And she has carried us here. She has raised us up. She is worth a legion to me.”

— Seth Dickinson

75. “If the Masquerade could not be stopped by spear or treaty, she would change it from within.”

— Seth Dickinson

76. “I want to understand where power comes from,” she said, without any hesitation. “And how it can best be used.”

— Seth Dickinson

77. “Baru selected another marrow-rich bone and felt for the breakpoint. “Did you really give me a slow poison last summer?” “Child,” Xate Olake said, with a kind of wary fondness, “I thought you would bring yourself to ruin without my help.”

— Seth Dickinson

78. “You will know your ruin well. You will put yourself into it as you have put yourself into us, thinking that it is your will. But it is your doom that moves you thus. And your flesh will be filled with ruin, as you have come to bring ruin into us.”

— Seth Dickinson

79. “Sometimes smiling is work.”

— Seth Dickinson

80. “There are families here, Baru.” There are families everywhere, Baru thought. That has never stopped anyone: except the people who lose.”

— Seth Dickinson

81. “I am Abdumasi of the House of Abd, master of ships, champion cat gambler, and I challenge you to mortal up-fuckery!”

— Seth Dickinson

82. “The Throne likes to see conspiracies everywhere. The real world never fits together so well.”

— Seth Dickinson

83. “Yes, Juris thought. Keep trying. Keep finding wrongs, and naming them, and trying to make them right. Never stop. Even now.”

— Seth Dickinson

84. “But at least there is revenge, which is like justice the way saltwater is like fresh.”

— Seth Dickinson

85. “Were mountains waves traveling through earth, millennia in their crest and crash?”

— Seth Dickinson

86. “Give a woman power – not a hearth to keep or an office to run, but real power, power she didn’t have to constantly guard or justify – and she would gain all power’s evils with it. Evils which were not intrinsically masculine at all, but which, in societies that gave men power, belonged most often to men.”

— Seth Dickinson