Jo Walton

It doesn’t matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books

but so many have died, and there are so many men of quality in Hell—is there any reason why you should be ashamed to join them?

the colour of innocent stone, while these are the colours of all-too-guilty flesh.

“You only have to look about you at the world and see who has the earthly power to know that such compacts do occur.”

Everyone rails against fallen women, as if they have
been sinning on their own. It is the men who lead them astray, and what are they supposed to do afterwards?

thinking that Lucrezia is worth two of her brother.

But he knows Florence needs him to keep the demons away. Surely that is why God has given him the power to see them and to banish them?

“You should have been a man,” he says, unpremeditatedly.

She turns and looks at him over her shoulder, not smiling at all now. “If I’d been a man I’d never have lost control of the city and it would be you coming to ask me for favours, Brother Girolamo.”

“God and the Holy Virgin will send Santa Caterina a hundred women, before I die, more than a hundred, because of you. In place of girls thrust into religion to be out of the way of their family, we will have women, grown women, coming of their own strong desire to be pure, to live as Wailers, to be closer to God.”

Girolamo turns the stone in his hand and looks down on its green smoothness. Hope hurts.