Spiderlight
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Helping people is like beating your head against a wall, and in the end, when you live forever and you’re sick of the same mistakes over and over and over; in the end the only thing left is just to amuse yourself at their expense. Because you can’t make things better, and frankly, no matter how much evil you do, you’re not making things much worse, either.”
“perhaps pain’s the enemy no matter which side you’re on,”
“You’re a priestess. That means people don’t think of you the same way. But believe me, most of us basically can’t talk to a man without him looking us over and deciding whether or not he wants to give us the shaft. And if he does then, whatever else we are, whatever else we do, it’s always there, somewhere in his mind. And if he doesn’t fancy us, then that’s a judgment too, writing us off as a thing without value. You can’t get rid of it. And either way it means you’re always a woman, first. You’re not a warrior, or an archer, or even just a friend to drink with. You’re a woman, and that means you’ve got a place, and a use.”
“What was building a web but a gustatory expression of hope?”
“Were all beings just a thin skin of volition floating on a sea of drives and directives they could not control?”
“They were stupid!” he got out through clenched fangs. “Stupid and blind and limited! And I tried to tell them! I said everything I could to show how murderous and merciless and terrible you—we—you are! But they thought they knew best. They had to challenge you. They dared encroach on the world of humanity. And that means death. I know that now. It always means death.”
“There’s a lot of Dark territory between us and the Shadow Canyons,” Lief pointed out unhappily. “Ghants and blight-wolves and Murgl-wyrms and all sorts.” His finger traced a line from Shogg’s Ford, showing the route. “Not convinced that the power of prophecy’s going to get us through all that.” “It will be an epic journey,” Harathes said potentiously. “A worthy quest, through monsters and the servants of the Dark one, past evil forests, marshes, and jagged rocks . . .” “Mm.” Lief grimaced. “You’re not selling it to me.”
“There had been other Dark Lords, a string of them back through history as various evil men discovered the true power of the Dark and rose to dominate the evil creatures of the world.”
“Not a spider,” he spat, with a string of bloody saliva. “All I wanted to be was a spider. I was happy as a spider. Or what a spider thinks is happy. Your prophecy. They made me into this for your prophecy. And you have killed the only man who could make it right. Not a spider. Not a man. Not any thing.”
“New food. Different food. That had everyone’s interest. Across the span of the web, that was strung in mistlike sheets from tree to tree across their forest, he felt the others rousing, rising from their torpor. There was always food, even for so many bodies as Mother’s Brood ran to, but variety was welcome.”
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Book Keywords:
spider-web, drive, spider, hope, drives, hunger, spiders, control, passion, philosophy, agency
