I'm a chess piece. A pawn,' she said. 'I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.

They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.

Blood is not destiny.

What I'm hoping to do though is to ground my extrapolations in specificity, and to make sure that the story I tell is deliberately and honestly told.

Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in his crèche, learning to respect but never yield to. Pain was simply a message, telling him which limbs he could still use to slaughter his enemies, how far he could still run, and what his chances were in the next battle.

We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind.

Of course, the more you read, the more you learn, and ultimately there is more information than you can ever use. The difficulty is that as an outsider, you know you're too ignorant for your own good, and so the urge to keep researching and *never* start writing is pretty strong.