The Obelisk Gate

Highlights

Page 294

Find who, to do what, you can’t even begin to guess. “Will you still tell me what all this is about?” “No. Because in spite of everything, Essun, I don’t want you to die.”

Note: Annoying. This is similar to that Netflix show Defenders. Characters don’t explain squat to each other to keep the audience in the dark

Page 665

No. No. He knows the price. Better to die than pay it. But it is one thing to resolve to die, quite another to actually carry out that resolve in the midst of dying.

Page 856

Don’t be fooled. The Guardians are much, much older than Old Sanze, and they do not work for us. —Last recorded words of Emperor Mutshatee, prior to his execution

Note: First saw these fragments in Mistborn. Absolutely love them

Page 282

It is a manipulation. Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows.

Page 330

“Crazy” is also what roggas who obey choose to call roggas that don’t. You obeyed, once, because you thought it would make you safe. He showed you—again and again, unrelentingly, he would not let you pretend otherwise—that if obedience did not make one safe from the Guardians or the nodes or the lynchings or the breeding or the disrespect, then what was the point? The game was too rigged to bother playing.

Page 955

“It’s amazing, when you think about it. Everyone in the Stillness is like this. Never mind what’s in the oceans, never mind what’s in the sky; never look at your own horizon and wonder what’s beyond it. We’ve spent centuries making fun of the astronomests for their crackpot theories, but what we really found incredible was that they ever bothered to look up to formulate them.”

Page 982

The Guardians who work with the Fulcrum are one of the factions I told you about, so to speak. They’re the ones who want the status quo: roggas made safe and useful, stills doing all the work and thinking they run the place, Guardians actually in charge of everything. Controlling the people who can control natural disasters.” You’re surprised by this. No, you’re surprised you didn’t think of it yourself. But then you haven’t spent much time thinking about Guardians, when you weren’t in the immediate vicinity of one. Maybe this is another kind of thought aversion you’ve been conditioned to: Don’t look up, and don’t think about those damned smiles.

Page 291

Ykka steps up to her, getting right in her face, and Tonkee goes silent at once. “I would rather understand nothing about this place,” Ykka says, brutally quiet and cold now, “than risk destroying it. Can you say the same?” Tonkee stares back at her, trembling visibly and saying nothing. But the answer’s obvious, isn’t it? Tonkee’s like Hjarka. Both were raised Leadership, raised to put the needs of others first, and both chose a more selfish path. It’s not even a question.

Page 401

Ah, this ridiculous war of ours. We use your kind so easily. Even you, my Essun, my treasure, my pawn. One day, I hope, you will forgive me.

Page 432

There are too many lorist tales of what can happen to a comm without meat. It will make people weak and paranoid, the community becoming vulnerable to attack. The only choice that will prevent this outcome, Tonkee explains, is cannibalism. Planting more beans just isn’t enough.

Note: Questionable, but I can give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe these people are different anatomically from us. Maybe their sessunae need meat. But logically it seems like a bad mutation, one less likely to help survival

Page 998

Umber says, “And if Schaffa decides you should die?” “Then I die.” That’s what the Fulcrum got wrong, she feels certain. They treated the Guardians as enemies, and maybe they once were, like Schaffa said. But allies must trust in one another, be vulnerable to one another. Schaffa is the only person in the world who loves Nassun, and Nassun will die, or kill, or remake the world, for his sake.

Note: Abusive relationship

Page 214

You’re abbreviating heavily, not lying. That’s what you tell yourself. That’s what you need to tell Ykka, so that she never learns that orogenes have the potential power to save the world, and so that she never attempts to access an obelisk herself. This is what Alabaster must have constantly had to do with you—telling you some of the truth because you deserve it, but not enough that you’ll skewer yourself on it.

Note: I’m willing to forgive the Marvel Defenders bullshit from earlier

Page 377

She’s wanted to do something good with orogeny, when she has used it to do so many terrible things already—and she wanted to do it for him. He is the only person in the world who understands her, loves her for what she is, protects her despite what she is.

Note: Textbook abusive relationship

Page 796

“No vote,” you say. It’s so quiet that you can hear water trickling out of the pipes in the communal pool, hundreds of feet below. “Leave. Go join Rennanis if they’ll have you. But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any other part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.”

Page 836

That Castrima has lasted this far, a comm of stills who have repeatedly failed to lynch the roggas openly living among them, is miraculous. Even if “hasn’t yet committed genocidal slaughter” is a low bar to hop, other communities haven’t even managed that much. You’ll give credit where it’s due.

Page 134

Maybe she couldn’t shift a pebble because who the rust needs to shift pebbles? That’s the Fulcrum’s way of testing precision. Ykka’s way is to simply be precise, where it is practical to do so. Maybe she failed your tests because they were the wrong tests.

Page 224

The boilbugs move. You perceive them as a wave of bright heat that surges out of underground nests and aboveground feeding piles that have formed around their many victims—hundreds of nests, millions of bugs, you had no idea the forest of Castrima was so riddled with them. Tonkee’s warning about the meat shortage is meaningless and too late; you could never have competed against such successful predators. You were always going to have to get used to the taste of human anyway.

Note: Morbid

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