"What is a secret? It is much more than knowledge shared with only a few, or perhaps only one another. It is power. It is a bond. It is a sign of deep trust, or the darkest threat possible. There is power in the keeping of a secret, and power in the revelation of a secret. Sometimes it takes a very wise man to discern which is the path to greater power. All men desirous of power should become collectors of secrets. There is no secret too small to be valuable. All men value their own secrets far above those of others. A scullery maid may be willing to betray a prince before allowing the name of her secret lover to be told."

"When you want a thing so badly for so long, and then it comes time to face that you cannot have it, sometimes-''Sometimes you can't believe it when it comes to you. Sometimes you're afraid to believe it. I understand your hesitation."

"If all of her was not enough for him, then let him have none of her and seek what he needed elsewhere."

"I wanted us to share all our lives. You wish to keep me in a box, separate from your life. I cannot be someone you come to when you have nothing more important to do."

"You're not who he expected you to be, that doesn't mean you aren't somebody. Nor are you perfect. Stop using every mistake you make as an excuse to fail completely."

"That is the challenge Companion. To take what has happened to you and learn from it. Nothing is quite so destructive as pity, especially self-pity. No event in life is so terrible that one cannot rise above it."

"No. You stop. Stop thinking you're the son your father disowned. You're not who he expected you to be, that doesn't mean you aren't somebody. Nor are you perfect. Stop using every mistake you make as an excuse to fail completely."

"Assassins take no pride in fighting fairly. We take pride in winning."

"Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever."

"As if he hadn't always known he was loved the best. That he was the Beloved."

"Life is a balance. We tend to forget that as we go blithely from day to day. We eat and drink and sleep and assume we will always rise up the next day, that meals and rest will always replenish us. Injuries we expect to heal, and pain to lessen as time goes by. Even when we are faced with wounds that heal more slowly, with pain that lessens by day only to return in full force at nightfall, even when sleep does not leave us rested, we still expect that somehow tomorrow will all come back into balance and that we will go on. At some point, the exquisite balance has tipped, and despite all our flailing efforts, we begin the slow fall from the body that maintains itself to the body that struggles, nails clawing, to cling to what it used to be."

"Perhaps there can be no thanks nor any blame, but only recognition of the forces that brought us and bound us to our inevitable fates."

"Perhaps the greatest thing one can discover is that you can decide who you are. You don't have to be whom the Ludlucks made you. You don't even have to be who you were before that. You can choose. We are all creatures of our own devising."

"I lived my grief, I slept mourning and ate sorrow and drank tears. I ignored all else."

"But in my heart, when I said "my king, I meant Verity."

"Acceptance of what is. That is the shortest path to peace with yourself."

"I lied to hurt you. For letting him be dead while you lived. For being loved by him more than he loved me!He loved you more than he ever loved any of the rest of us!"

"One had a knife. But I had a staff and was trained to use it."

"Stop your whining. If you are frightened, be silent. Whining is for prey. It attracts predators. And you are not prey."

"And what do you believe?A slow smile spread over his face. "I believe in you. You are my new beginning."

"Humans could never accept the world as it was and live in it. They were always breaking it and living amongst the shattered pieces."

"When the mainstay of one's world is taken away, it's only natural to cling to all the rest, to try desperately to keep things as close to the way they were as one can." He shook his head sorrowfully. "But no one can ever go back to yesterday."

"She had come to letters late in her life, and though she had mastered them, they had never become her good friends."

"There are endings. There are beginnings. Sometimes they coincide, with the ending of one thing marking the beginning of another. But sometimes there is simply a long space after an ending, a time when it seems everything else has ended and nothing else can ever begin."

"Why must it be one or the other?' she countered. 'You are both a capable seaman and the son of a Bingtown Trader. Why should not I have both sets of skill?"

"Had she learned to feel again, only to have to feel this? Could any amount of love ever be worth the pain of losing it?"

"In the dead of night I stirred. Wakefulness flowed back into me. I was a cup full of sorrow, but that sorrow was stilled, like a pain that abates as long as one does not move."

"Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more."

"If one bad thing befell me, I immediately linked it to every bad thing that had happened in the last week or might happen in the coming week. And when I became sad, I was prone to wallow in grief, piling up my woes and sprawling on them like a dragon on a hoard."

"When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead."

"The fight isn't over until you win."

"Somehow," she said coldly, "you have confused profitable and not profitable for right and wrong. I, however, have not."

"The problem is not that we forget the past. It is that we recall it too well. Children recall wrongs that enemies did to their grandfathers, and blame the granddaughters of the old enemies. Children are not born with memories of those who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn't tell their children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better."

"And to die with the Warrior's Prayer on his lips. For, 'Yes', he had sighed on his dying breath, and all knew that was the ultimate prayer one could offer to life. Acceptance."

"His face was so ravaged, it was like looking at death itself. Except for the smooth, silvered part of it. By creeping degrees, his human hand lifted. He turned it over, showing a bloody palm. His cracked lips moved. 'Beloved.'He could not say the word, but I knew it. So did his Fool."

"There would always be dishonorable things done to preserve the honor of any power."

"Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning."

"You want a mate who will follow your dream. You don't want to give up your own ambitions to make someone else's life possible.''I supposed that's true,' Althea admitted reluctantly. An instant later she demanded, 'Why is that so wrong?''It isn't,' Amber assured her, A moment later she added wickedly, 'As long as you're male."

"As dye soaks fibres, drawn into them to change their colour forever, so does a memory, stinging or sweet, change the fibre of a man's character."

"Strange, how being left out of a secret always feels like a betrayal of trust."

"That part of your life is over. Set it aside as something you have finished. Complete or no, it is done with you. No being gets to decide what his life is "supposed to be"...'Be a man. Discover where you are now, and go on from there, making the best of things. Accept your life, and you might survive it. If you hold back from it, insisting this is not your life, not where you are meant to be, life will pass you by. You may not die from such foolishness, but you might as well be dead for all the good your life will do you or anyone else."

"One way to disperse fear and create decision was to consider the worst possible outcome of one's actions."

"They regarded our passage not at all, and by the afternoon I felt no more significant than an ant. I had never thought to be disdained by a tree."

"Those were some astounding lies, cub. And the very last one the most inspired of all. You have your father's talent for it."

"A woman of many talents. And intelligent, too. He'd probably have to kill her soon."

"His face was so ravaged, it was like looking at death itself. Except for the smooth, silvered part of it. By creeping degrees, his human hand lifted. He turned it over, showing a bloody palm. His cracked lips moved. Beloved.He could not say the word, but I knew it. So did his Fool."

"Dragons don't bother with introductions."

"That destiny is not reserved for a few chosen ones. Each man has a destiny. Recognizing it and fulfilling it are the purpose of a man's life."

"The word of a cat is not to be relied upon."

"The past is no further away than the last breath you took."