"At the dockside I was pleasantly surprised to find the North wasn't all hairy men in animal skins. There was also hairy women in animal skins."

"There's a problem with continually stamping down on the least sensible instincts that drive men to recklessly endanger themselves. Even the most reasonable and level-headed of us have only limited space to store such unwanted emotion. You keep putting the stuff away, shoving it to the back of your mind but like an over-full cupboard there comes a point where you try to cram one more thing into it and all of a sudden something snaps, the catch gives, the door bursts open and everything inside spills out on top of you."

"Perhaps I just wanted to know what it was that I wanted. Maybe that is all that growing up means."

"When you've committed yourself to violence it takes an almost inhuman effort to stop short. It's one of those things that once you've started need to be finished, rather like coitus, interrupting that's a sin, even the priests say so."

"I can help you, Jorge. I can give you back your self. I can give you your will.' He held out his hand, palm open. 'Free will has to be taken,' I said."

"It's the silence that scares me. It's the blank page on which I can write my own fears."

"Running ain't no bad thing. Leastways if you run in the right direction."

"Brother Row you could trust to make a long shot with a short bow. You could trust him to come out of a knife fight with somebody else's blood on his shirt. You could trust him to lie, to cheat, to steal, and to watch your back. You couldn't trust his eyes though. He had kind eyes, and you couldn't trust them."

"When a course of action is forced upon you it's best to accept it with grace and milk it for whatever you can get, right up to the moment the first opportunity to weasel out of the deal presents itself."

"For the longest time I studied revenge to the exclusion of all else. I built my first torture chamber in the dark vaults of imagination. Lying on bloody sheets in the Healing Hall I discovered doors within my mind that I'd not found before, doors that even a child of nine knows should not be opened. Doors that never close again. I threw them wide."

"It is purity of spirit that will keep corruption from the flesh."

"The holy stone looked for all the world like a small iron pineapple, its surface divided into squares by deep grooves, a tarnished silver-steel handle or lever held tight to the side. In ancient times the pineapple was ever the symbol of welcome, though the church used the objects in a different way. Apparently, each theological student of good family and destined for high office was given one on beginning their training and forbidden from pulling the lever on pain of excommunication. A test of obedience they called it. A test of curiosity I called it. Clearly the church wanted bishops who lacked the imagination for exploration and questioning."

"Cold has its own taste. It tastes of a bitten tongue. It coils around you, a living thing, a beast that means to kill you, not with wrath, not with tooth nor claw, but with the mercy of surrender, with the kindness of letting you go gentle into the long night after such a burden of pain and misery."

"Out here you need to live in the moments. Watch the world. You're a young man, Jal, a child who's refused to grow up. Do it now, or you'll die a young man."

"There are no other choices for you, Prince Jalan, and when there are no choices all men are equally brave."

"Gomst's mouth framed a 'no', but every other muscle in him said 'yes'. You'd think priests would be better liars, what with their jobs and all."

"Sometimes our worst fears aren't realized - though in my experience it's only to make room for the fears our imagination was insufficient to house."

"Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man's memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull."

"Every star, turning in the black depth of heaven, burns for no better reason than that humanity raised its face to look. Every great deed needs to be witnessed. Go out there and do something great."

"I want her beyond reason. I need to own, consume, worship, devour. What I've made of her in my mind cannot live in flesh."

"People always want to know things . . . until they hear them, and then it's too late. Knowledge is a rug of a certain size, and the world is larger. It's not what remains uncovered at the edges that should worry you, rather what is swept beneath."

"When they killed him, Mother wouldn't hold her peace, so they slit her throat. I was stupid then, being only nine, and I fought to save them both. But the thorns held me tight. I've learned to appreciate thorns since. The thorns taught me the game. They let me understand what all those grim and serious men who've fought the Hundred War have yet to learn. You can only win the game when you understand that it IS a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him loose them all."

"You have my advice. Carry it with you. It won't slow you down."

"Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it."

"After all, that's all a man really needs: a big city full of sin and sleaze, and a chance."

"It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war."

"Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them."

"It's always better to sit on your dignity in private than to stand on it in public."

"A book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat them with respect."

"When you become a father, it changes you.' Snorri spoke towards the fire's glow. 'You see the world in new ways. Those who are not changed were not properly men to begin with."

"Better a long ignoble life of shallow pleasures than a short stab at heroism, ending with a short stab. And just because one man plays another doesn't always mean that it's not the right direction for both of them."

"Revenge is a business of calculation, best served cold. Rescue holds more of sacrifice, suicidal danger, and all manner of other madness that should have me running in the opposite direction."

"Nothing can be cut away. Even the worst of our memories is part of the foundation that keeps us in the world."

"Give us everything we ask for and suddenly it's too much."

"It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war."

"We can't be trapped by fear. Lives lived within such walls are just slower deaths."

"That's my secret and my shame. I'm Nona Grey, war is in my veins, and the screams of my enemies are music to me."

"Genuine surprise is a great help when faced with an unwelcome duty. Of course, when it's the paying of debts you're forgetting, that can lead to broken fingers. And worse. I guess it's a form of lying- lying to oneself. And I'm very good at falsehoods. They often say the best liars half-believe their lies- which makes me the very best because if I repeat a lie often enough I can end up believing it entirely, no half measures involved!"

"The way I'd put it, said Makin, 'is that Rike can't make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace."

"He broke off his explanation, seeing in his daughter's eyes the exact moment that a child first understands there are limits on what her parents can do, rather than just limits on what they choose to do. He knelt before her in a moment's silence, somewhat less than he had been just seconds before, and Emy a half step closer to the woman she would one day become."

"And that's how it is in this world, boy. Start a tale, just a little tale that should fade and die-take your eye off it for just a moment and when you turn back it's grown big enough to grab you up in its teeth and shake you. That's how it is. All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce."

"You can win the victories you seek, Jorg. But only if you find better reasons to want them."