"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.... Be very chary of revealing your hoarded secrets. Many lose all power once they have been divulged. Be even more careful of sharing your secrets lest you find yourself a puppet dancing on someone else's strings."

"Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?"

"I could not make it right, but I could make someone pay for how wrong it had been."

"There is no path to the future, Fitz. The path is now. Now is all there is, or ever will be. You can change perhaps the next breaths in your life. But after that, random chance seizes you in its jaws again. A tree falls on you, a spider bites your ankle, and all your grand plans for winning a battle are for naught. Now is what we have, Fitz, and now is where we act to stay alive."

"To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibility, to be bound by the rules of that group."

"There are always choices. But sometimes there are no good ones."

"And so the Wolf of the West rose from the stone! And so he will rise again if ever the folk of the Six Duchies call to him in need."

"They were all gone now, broken or taken by people who had no idea what such items represented. Let them go. She held the past in her heart, with no need of physical items to tie it down."

"That no man can truly imagine being happy and that's why happiness isn't for sale here."

"His absence seemed a solid thing, a burden I must carry in addition to my grief... Yet I knew I would continue to live. Sometimes that knowledge seemed the worst part of my loss."

"I truly wanted to live a life in which I could make my own choices, independent of the 'duties' of my birth and position. It was only when fate granted that to me that I realized the cost of it. I could set aside my responsibilities to others and live my life as I please only when I also severed my ties to them. I could not have it both ways. To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibilities, to be bound by the rules of that group."

"There was a danger in asking too much of a child, but the danger of asking too little was almost equal."

"There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it."

"I think I made a better boy than I do a man, I admitted ruefully to the wolf. Why not wait until you've been at it a bit longer and then decide? he suggested."

"And like a child, I'd be testing the people who loved me, pulling away from them almost for the sole reason of seeing if anyone would come after me."

"But change proves that you are still alive. Change often measures our tolerance for folk different from ourselves. Can we accept their languages, their customs, their garments, and their foods into our own lives? If we can, then we form bonds, bonds that make wars less likely. If we cannot, if we believe that we must do things as we have always done them, then we must either fight to remain as we are, or die."

"Isn't it strange how wise counsel can cool the hottest head? He made sense but my heart screamed protest."

"For he was the Fool now, all of Lord Chance and Lady Amber and Lord Golden scraped away by sorrow. He was no one's Beloved now."

"Leave off sniffing the carcass of your old life-do you enjoy unending pain? There is no shame in walking away from bones. Nor is there any special wisdom in injuring oneself over and over. What is your loyalty to that pain? To abandon it will not lessen you."

"Why not break free now, and make Bingtown a place where folk begin anew, all men standing on an equal footing?""And all women, too."She must be Sparse's daughter, thought Keffria. Even her voice echoed his in tone. Devouchet looked at her in surprise."It was but a manner of speaking, Ekke," he said mildly."A manner of speaking becomes a manner of thinking."

"Had they been dogs they would have sniffed me over and then drawn back. But humans have no such inbred courtesies."

"How often does a man know, without question, that he has done well? I do not think it happens often in anyone's life, and it becomes even rarer once one has a child."

"Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years."

"I will always take your part, Bee. Right or wrong. That is why you must always take care to be right, lest you make your father a fool."

"I lied!' I spat my whisper at him. 'I knew you read my journal. I knew you read my dreams. I wrote there what I thought would hurt you most! I lied to hurt you. For letting him be dead while you lived. For being loved by him more than he loved me!' I took a breath. 'He loved you more than he ever loved any of the rest of us!"

"As I apologized to her a flicker of panic raced through me and then faded away. There wasn't enough life left in me to panic. I'd made a mistake and I was dying. Apparently not even a Speck afterlife was available to me. I'd simply stop being. Apparently I hadn't died correctly. Oops."

"The death of Nighteyes gutted me. I walked wounded through my life in the days that followed, unaware of just how mutilated I was. I was like the man who complains of the itching of his severed leg. The itching distracts from the immense knowledge that one will forever after hobble through life."

"Boredom is vastly underrated. Boredom means that nothing is trying to kill you every day."

"He gave a final shake of his coat. I go to the hunt!"

"Open your eyes. This horrible mess is your life. There is no sense in waiting for it to get better. Stop putting it off and live it."

"I found myself speaking softly as if I were telling an old tale to a young child. And giving it a happy ending, when all know that tales never end, and the happy ending is but a moment to catch one's breath before the next disaster. But I didn't want to think about that. I didn't want to wonder what would happen next."

"I can see that you go through life athwart it. You see the flow of events, you are able to tell how you could most easily fit yourself into it. But you dare to oppose it. And why? Simply because you look at it and say, 'this fate does not suit me. I will not allow it to befall me.'" Amber shook her head, but her small smile made it an affirmation. "I have always admired people who can do that. So few do. Many, of course, will rant and rave against the garment fate has woven for them, but they pick it up and on it all the same, and most wear it to the end of their days. You... you would rather go naked into the storm."

"Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings?"

"Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back."

"I feared my own kind more than anything the natural world could ever threaten me with."

"Men of passion and vision are often seen as mad."

"I don't want to have these burdens. But I can't bear to turn them over to anyone else, either. Because, despite all the work, I like being in control of my own life."

"It's not the sort of thing one asks of a friend. He hasn't offered, and I will not ask it. I will not tear him that way. I am trying to let go. I don't know how."

"Love isn't just about feeling sure of the other person, knowing what he would give up for you. It's knowing with certainty what you are willing to surrender for his sake. Make no mistake; each partner gives up something. Individual dreams are surrendered for a shared one. In some marriages, one partner gives up almost everything she once thought she wanted. But it's not always the woman who does so. Such sacrifice is not shameful. It's love. If you think the man is worth it, it works."

"Be a little puppet on their strings. That was what Reyn wanted from her, also. She recognized that even if he did not. He was attracted to her not just for her beauty and charm, but because she was young. He thought he could control all her actions and even her thoughts."

"A while later, I lingered in the hinterlands of sleep. Sometimes I think there is more rest in that place between wakefulness and sleep than there is in true sleep. The mind walks in the twilight of both states, and finds the truths that are hidden alike by daylight and dreams. Things we are not ready to know abide in that place, awaiting that unguarded frame of mind."

"It was better to leave the space empty of words than to choose the wrong ones."

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

"Why does the forbidden always add that edge of sweetness?"

"The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt...He had wished me well in finding my own fate to follow, and I never doubted his sincerity. But it had taken me years to accept that his absence in my life was a deliberate finality, an act he had chosen, a thing completed even as some part of my soul still dangled, waiting for his return."

"There was, she suddenly saw, many ways to be raped."

"The days we shared I alone would remember now.I suddenly felt less real."

"Some part of me knew that was important. That once it would have mattered terribly to me."

"I was amazed at how strong women were when they were angry."

"It was as if I had been following a narrow trail, and had suddenly realized that at any time I could leave it and strike out cross-country."