欧宝娱乐

“Your heart is in your eyes, Your Highness," murmured Tamar, wiping the sweat from her brow.
Tolya poled his twin in the arm with a sparring sword. "Tamar knows because that's the way she looks at her wife"
"I am free to look at my wife any way I please."
"But Zoya is not Nikolai's wife.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Rule of Wolves

“At Keramzin, I had a doll I made out of an old sock that I used to talk to whenever he was away hunting. Maybe that would make me feel better."
"You were an odd little girl."
"You have no idea. What did you and Tolya play with?"
"The skulls of our enemies."
I saw the glint in her eye, and we both burst out laughing.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm

“Ivan gabbled something in Shu that I didn't understand. The giant just laughed.
"You speak Shu like a tourist," he said.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm

“The central fact of biblical history, the birth of the Messiah, more than any other, presupposes the design of Providence in the selecting and uniting of successive producers, and the real, paramount interest of the biblical narratives is concentrated on the various and wondrous fates, by which are arranged the births and combinations of the 'fathers of God.' But in all this complicated system of means, having determined in the order of historical phenomena the birth of the Messiah, there was no room for love in the proper meaning of the word. Love is, of course, encountered in the Bible, but only as an independent fact and not as an instrument in the process of the genealogy of Christ. The sacred book does not say that Abram took Sarai to wife by force of an ardent love, and in any case Providence must have waited until this love had grown completely cool for the centenarian progenitors to produce a child of faith, not of love. Isaac married Rebekah not for love but in accordance with an earlier formed resolution and the design of his father. Jacob loved Rachel, but this love turned out to be unnecessary for the origin of the Messiah. He was indeed to be born of a son of Jacob - Judah - but the latter was the offspring, not of Rachel but of the unloved wife, Leah. For the production in the given generation of the ancestor of the Messiah, what was necessary was the union of Jacob precisely with Leah; but to attain this union Providence did not awaken in Jacob any powerful passion of love for the future mother of the 'father of God' - Judah. Not infringing the liberty of Jacob's heartfelt feeling, the higher power permitted him to love Rachel, but for his necessary union with Leah it made use of means of quite a different kind: the mercenary cunning of a third person - devoted to his own domestic and economic interests - Laban. Judah himself, for the production of the remote ancestors of the Messiah, besides his legitimate posterity, had in his old age to marry his daughter-in-law Tamar. Seeing that such a union was not at all in the natural order of things, and indeed could not take place under ordinary conditions, that end was attained by means of an extremely strange occurrence very seductive to superficial readers of the Bible. Nor in such an occurrence could there be any talk of love. It was not love which combined the priestly harlot Rahab with the Hebrew stranger; she yielded herself to him at first in the course of her profession, and afterwards the casual bond was strengthened by her faith in the power of the new God and in the desire for his patronage for herself and her family. It was not love which united David's great-grandfather, the aged Boaz, with the youthful Moabitess Ruth, and Solomon was begotten not from genuine, profound love, but only from the casual, sinful caprice of a sovereign who was growing old.”
― Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love

“You come back to train with Botkin. I hit big girl same as little girl."
"That's very egalitarian of you." I said, and hurried Tamar out of the stables before Botkin decided to show me just how fair-minded he could be.”
― Leigh Bardugo

“He's a warrior," she'd said. "If you make him believe he's less now, he'll never know he can be more.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising

“It would be something special," said Tamar, "to have a Grisha on the throne."

"She's right," added Genya. "To be the ones to rule, instead of just serve.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising

“A boy leans over me: ruddy hair, a broken nose. He reminds me of the too-clever fox, another one of Ana Kuya's stories, smart enough to get out of a one trap, but too foolish to realise he won't escape a second.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm

“I felt awful and I did an awful thing.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Deriving Life