"It is worse than useless to do things halfway Bee, for then you think the work is done, but someone must come behind you later to do it all over again. Even if you must work much harder and get less done, it is better to do the whole task the first time."

"Regrets are useless, " the Fool replied. "All you can do is start from where you are."

"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. That, I think, is the shock of any relationship ending. It is realizing that what is still an ongoing relationship to someone is, for the other person, something finished and done with."

"For the weakest has but to try his strength to find it, and then he shall be strong."

"I once knew of a minstrel who bragged of having had a thousand women, one time each. He would never know what I knew, that to have one woman a thousand times, and each time find in her a different delight, is far better. I knew now what gleamed in the eyes of old couples when they stared at each other across a room...My familiarity with her was a more potent love elixir than any potion sold by a hedge-witch in the market."

"Fool, there is no sense in trying to play that game with the past. Here is where we are today, and we can only make our moves from here."

"This was misery that could not yield, for he sorrowed for a time he could not return to, and a self he would never again be."

"I was lonely, and a lonely heart has hungers that can overpower both common sense and dignity."

"He thought perhaps it was a woman's way, to come out of such a storm of emotion and pain as if she were a ship emerging onto calm seas. She had seemed, not at peace, but emptied of sorrow. As if she had run out of that particular emotion and no other one arose to take its place."

"Think of what is and don't let what might have been distract you."

"Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path. An accumulation of small acts can change the world."

"History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took."

"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."

"The fight isn't over until you win it...That's all you have to remember. No matter what the other man thinks."

"But if she is alone now, it is because she chose to be alone, not someone decree if for her. Her life is hers to live, not yours to repair."

"As long as you believe it is impossible, you close your mind to understanding it."

"Life is not a race to restore a past situation. Nor does one have to hurry to meet the future. Seeing how things change is what makes life interesting."

"I was dying. And I had never been enough for anything."

"Refuse anxiety. When you borrow trouble against what might be, you neglect the moment you have now to enjoy. The man who worries about what will next be happening to him loses this moment in dread of the next with pre-judgement."

"Perhaps once one realised how deeply one could bond with a creature as foreign as a dragon, all forms of human love seemed more acceptable."

"Everything she sang was true. I will leave it to you as to whether the truth can exist with details omitted, or if those lacks make a lie of it."

"Suspense was an excellent tool for keeping powerful people off balance. It gave one bargaining power."

"I must talk to Kennit first. He will tell me when he is ready for us to have a baby.""Never," Bolt said flatly."What?""Never wait for a male on any such decision. You are the queen. You decide. Males are not made for such decisions. I have seen it time and time again. They would have you wait for days of sunshine and wealth and plenty. Yet to a male, enough is never sufficient, and plenty never reached. A queen knows that when times are hardest and game most scarce, that is when one must care most about the continuance of the race. Some things are not for males to decide."

"To sate your need without love is theft."

"Still I promise myself, "Next time I will do better" in the all-too-human conceit that I will always be offered a "next time."

"I should live each day as if it were significant, as if everyday the fate of the world depended on my action."

"There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense."

"Everyone thinks that courage is about facing death without flinching. But almost anyone can do that. Almost anyone can hold their breath and not scream for as long as it takes to die. True courage is about facing life without flinching. I don't mean the times when the right path is hard, but glorious at the end. I'm talking about enduring the boredom, the messiness, and the inconvenience of doing what is right."

"Did you feel that?' I asked him.He smiled sadly. 'Fitz, I have never needed to touch you to feel that. It was always there. No limits."

"She is, Althea thought uneasily, what I pretend to be: a woman who does not let her sex deter her from living as she pleases."

"She had called herself a whore. That was a man's word, a shame-word flung at a woman. But she did not seem ashamed. She wielded the word like a sword, slicing away all his preconceptions of who she was. She had earned her living by her sex, and she did not seem to regret it."

"As much as I had always longed to be freed of my duties and obligations, being released from such bonds was as much a severing as an emancipation."

"Many great ideas are not unique. They only become unique when the men who have the wherewithal actually to implement them come together."

"Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?"

"I wish they would all go away.Except the Fool. I wished he would join me. Somehow, I had always thought he would join me. Now, I could not recall why. Perhaps I had buried that in the stone."

"He longed for cleanliness and tidiness: it was hard to find peace in the middle of disorder."

"We were both smiling, in that bittersweet way one does when imagining something the heart longs for and the head would dread."

"That is one thing that in all my years among your folk I have never become accustomed to. The great importance that you attach to what gender one is."

"I'll never miss a chance to remind you of what a brat you were. A gloriously beautiful and very spoiled brat. I was utterly charmed by your complete self-absorption. It was rather like courting a cat."

"A terrible premonition washed over me. This was how the whole world would end.... They would devour the forest and excrete piles of buildings made of stone wrenched from the earth or from dead trees. They would hammer paths of bare stone between their dwellings, and dirty the rivers and subdue the land until it could recall only the will of man. They could not stop themselves from doing what they did. They did not see what they did, and even if they saw, they did not know how to stop. They no longer knew what was enough."

"One part braggart to one part coward. He would fear everyone he did not control. And the next day he would fear those he controlled even more."

"I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world."

"If he ever wanted vengeance on me for all I did, he has it now. This is the worst thing he could do to me. Now I know how it feels to be left behind. As I left him."

"Gankis lifted an arm to point at the distant shale cliffs. "And in the face of it there were thousands of little holes, little what-you-call-'ems...""Alcoves," Kennit supplied in an almost dreamy voice. "I call them alcoves, Gankis. As would you, if you could speak your own mother tongue."

"One does not have to be Witted to know the companionship of a beast, and to know that the friendship of an animal is every bit as rich and complicated as that of a man or woman."

"Stop longing.You poison today's ease, reaching always for tomorrow."

"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."

"One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future."

"Leave the pain behind and let your life be your own again. There is a place where all time is now, and the choices are simple and always your own.Wolves have no kings."

"Be very chary of telling your hoarded secrets. Many lose all power once they have been divulged."