It was “a shape to make men weep,” wrote Firdred of Bain…

“The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned,…

— Sofia Samatar

“Once you have built something - something that takes all your passion and will - it becomes more precious to you than your own…

— Sofia Samatar

“Are you just going to stand there and leak like a broken hourglass?”

— Sofia Samatar

“There is no end to writing, I think, no end to the project of rescue." --Sofia Samatar, from "Fallow," in her collection, Tender”

— Sofia Samatar

“All through my journey his stories had fallen like snow. He was as full of them as a library with unmarked shelves. He was…

— Sofia Samatar

“Long is the journey homeward, Weary and worn are we. Oh, if I fall behind, my love, Will you look back for?”

— Sofia Samatar

“But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river…

— Sofia Samatar

“People talked about loneliness as if it were something alive and it could get you. But loneliness is something dead, it's deadness. Lonely people…

— Sofia Samatar

“The word for 'book' in all the known languages of the earth is vallon, 'chamber of words'...”

— Sofia Samatar

“There is enough cruelty in the world," she told me softly, "to justify all the music ever made.”

— Sofia Samatar

“The night sky was distended in my dreams, sinking to earth with the weight of destructive glory behind it. In one of those dreams…

— Sofia Samatar

“The truth has its own virtue, which is separate from its content.”

— Sofia Samatar

“As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendour of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbour City, whose lights…

— Sofia Samatar

“His exaltation left no room for the human.”

— Sofia Samatar