And he wondered at the contradiction: that he despised them, that he knew they could be up to no good, and that still he wanted to be respected by them enough to be included in their ranks. It was a very strange mix of emotions. He hadn’t the faintest idea how to sort through them.
R.F. Kuang, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (2022) — Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution