The Crystal City Quotes
"Being a maker was good, but it wasn’t everything. Not that Alvin needed reminding of that."
"You only got to be one-sixteenth black to be black in this town."
"Guess you learnt all that Spanish for nothing, Arthur Stuart."
"What do you want to bet they made up most of it?"
"I’m surprised at the breadth of your knowledge of the legal code of Nueva Barcelona."
"Your mother may feel better but I didn’t cure whatever caused the fever. She’s still sick, and she still needs to rest and let her body work on whatever’s wrong."
"Send her back to bed. She keeps standing there, the skeeters’ll eat her alive."
"Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without."
"The woman is the subtlest beast in the garden, now that snakes can’t talk."
"I can’t help it that I’ve got the grip and the heft of a blacksmith."
"It’s like life. Dust to dust, pot to pot, one big round, it never ends."
"I throw some cayenne peppers in it from time to time, that’s what makes it all edible."
"I didn’t do it. I’m just the one who has to clean up your mess."
"Filled with hate he was, and rage, and shame."
"The tool that he relied on before all others."
"Alvin was asleep, not knowing where dreams left off and the living nightmare of his failure to save more lives began."
"Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as aren’t afraid of truth."
"Good people don’t use such spells to draw a man."
"Don’t talk to me like you understand my sins."
"Plenty of masters with a lash who can testify it works."
"The world is sicker every day and I got no power to heal the world."
"What mattered was not that dream of what might have been. It was the process."
"The dreamers always seem to think their dream is worth the price that others will pay."
"The maker is the one who is part of what he makes."
"Stop thinking, he told himself. This ain’t science, this is serious."
"Ideas aren’t like land or poems or babies or something. If you tell me an idea, and I like it, then it’s my idea too."
"Sometimes the dog ain’t that quick and the bull ain’t that slow."
"I'll carry him if I have to, me and some of the bigger boys."
"I need a fog from you," said Alvin. "To cover the whole city. Except right at Frenchman’s Dock."
"I’m glad Margaret sent you," said Alvin. "And I’m glad you came."
"This was power-to change the look of the world, to blind the eyes of men and women, to block the light and heat of the sun, to allow slaves and oppressed people to sneak to freedom."
"It’s not enough to have power, Alvin. You have to have the will to use it."
"I spent too many years of my life worshiping you and tagging along behind you and begging for your attention and your love and your respect."
"Today we cross over Jordan to the promised land."
"You can’t keep us here no more, Conquistadores. You can take our city, but that’s only land. You can’t hold onto us when we’ve a mind to go."
"Listen to the music of the water and the sky, all the life around you. The greensong will carry you forward."
"Alvin unchoose me as his traveling companion years ago," said Verily. "But I’m still helping him-that’s why I’m here."
"What good is that? It’s two or three more years of life. Of loving and marrying and having babies. Of buying and selling, of plowing and planting and harvesting, of moving and settling."
"Nobody knew better than prostitutes just how few men were more than talk."
"Few whores, for instance, gave them their fifteen minutes free just because 'I’m a soldier and I might die.'"
"It’s not as if half these oafs won’t get themselves killed in some meaningless fight or just by falling into the river one drunken night."
"He might feel differently if he actually believed those ludicrous reports about a bridge made out of clear water that disappeared when his soldiers were out on it, causing a score of deaths and a lot of splashing and spluttering."
"Don’t be with them when they go down in flames."
"Not much," said Calvin. "For a maker, anyway."
"When Colonel Adan’s army finds those runaways, if he finds them, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if all their weapons turn into pools of metal on the ground."
"And I’ve got me a hankering to see what that tribe is like."
"But I reckon the common folk’ll be glad enough to be shut of these human-sacrificing heathens."
"You can’t make me go if I don’t want to, but I tell you that I want to, and so I will."
"I hear that the Mexica castrate the big boss before they cut out his heart."
"That’s why I had searched out Jim Bowie this morning and arranged with him to lead Calvin to Steve Austin."
"Arthur Stuart appeared behind her. 'It was,' he said. 'But sometimes guns just don’t do what you tell them.'"
"The way I see it, you ain’t half the maker your brother is, but you want us to think that whatever he can do, you can do."
"And I didn’t see that bridge you made across the water, I didn’t see these five thousand heartfires you brought with you out of the city and into the wilderness."
"A man isn’t free if he doesn’t know all that could be known about his choice."
"But if I told you, Alvin, you wouldn’t have done the things that had to be done."
"Because a life without Alvin in it held no hope of joy for her."
"The world was no poorer for the loss of a few such fools."
"I’m a sick and dying woman," said Ruth. "It’s cruel of you to do this to me in the last weeks of my life."
"We ain’t come here, sir, to bring vengeance or justice. Just freedom."
"Sometimes you should let a harmless lie stand, sir, for the sake of good manners."
"It’s like being in the Bible, don’t you think?"
"Why should I do this for Alvin? Or for Margaret Larner? What do I actually owe them?"
"He’d tried to learn makery with the others in Vigor Church, too, but even though his own knack was to see how things fit and change them enough to make them fit exactly right-which, as Alvin said, was one of the key parts of making-he still couldn’t do the things that Alvin could."
"He could set a broken bone-which wasn’t a bad knack to have-but he couldn’t heal an open wound."
"I’m a good lawyer, Verily told himself. I’m as good at law as I am at coopery. Maybe better."
"What I need is to find a lawyer in Noisy River who needs a good courtroom lawyer in his practice."
"You’re making a fence around some people who need protection," said Alvin. "Don’t start showing off, and don’t start trying to decide who gets rain and who doesn’t."
"It’s not like Alvin’s the only man around here who can do things."
"If only Alvin could see into people’s hearts."
"But water naturally tore and rusted and eroded and melted and mudded up everything it passed over or under or through."
"I can’t build up faster than the Unmaker tears down."
"But it was a plow first, before it turned to gold, and it was long overdue to be put to its proper use."