“Make yourself a myth and live within it, so that you belong to no one but yourself.”

“For Levi, when the cards no longer ran in his favor, he cheated – simple as that. Luck was a mechanism to be devised, and luck and destiny were merely two sides of the same coin.”

"Enne didn't want a savior. She wanted a partner."

"If Enne was about to become a street lord, then she could make her own rules. The City of Sin would learn that a pistol painted pink was just as lethal."

"Vianca wanted righteousness. Levi wanted glory. And she, Enne realized, wanted revenge."

"Oaths, omertas, Chainers - there's a reason so many in the North Side favor such weapons. New Reynes killed the queen the very day she hoped to negotiate peace. The City of Sin was built on duplicity."

“Don’t let your fallen heroes stop you from wanting to become one.”

“Remember—don’t do anything sinful here. This is a holy place after all,” Narinder warned him. “Even the lords of the North Side can behave themselves in a church.”
“Can you?” Levi asked, turning around, his eyebrow raised. Narinder answered with his gaze fixed on Levi’s lips.
“I haven’t decided if I want to.”

“Maybe your soul didn't break like a bone. Maybe it broke like a promise.”

“She had crawled her way inside him and buried herself there, and that meant every one of her words could wound or cut. He didn't know how to force her out - and he didn't want to.”

“Love always carved the deepest wounds.”

“Luck was a mechanism to be devised, and luck and destiny were merely two sides of the same coin.”

“He squeezed the iron arm of the bench in his fist, hard enough to make it bend. She smacked him. “Stop destroying property with your toxic masculinity.”

“I think it takes more strength to be vulnerable than it does to appear invincible.”

“It didn't matter whether she decked herself in knives or pearls. The world would always demand that a girl apologize for herself, but she would apologize for nothing.”

“Because the hero of one story is the villain of someone else's. It's all just a matter of who wins.”

"Screw you, Hilo," she snapped. "I can kill my ex-boyfriends myself."

"True love, Hilo mused, was sensual and euphoric, but also painful and tyrannical, demanding obidience."

"And if you loved someone, truly loved them, shouldn't their happiness matter, even more than your honor ?"

“She’d seen the resentment on the faces of her people. The glare in their eyes when they dared to look up. They were not a people grasping for power. Their rebellion would not fracture over stupid personal ambitions. They were a people who refused to be killed, and that made them dangerous. "

“We’ll get rid of them.”
“Then we’ll create another war,” said Kitay. “That’s what militaries do.”

“I know the vision you dreamed of for this nation and I know I may have destroyed it. But my first obligation is not to the unborn people of this country's future, but the people who are suffering now, who pass their days in fear because of the war that you have brought to their doorstep.”

“Our world is a dream of the gods. Maybe they have other dreams. But all we have is this story unfolding, and in the script of this world, nothing's going to bring Altan back to life.”

“I have tamed a land created to wither humans away until they are polished bone. Do not think to defy me.”

“They believe in a singular and all-powerful deity, which means they cannot accept the truth of other gods. And when nations start to believe that other beliefs lead to damnation, violence becomes inevitable.”