I’m already going to lose myself. I never want to have to deal with losing someone else, too.
I do not know how to live in a world where everyone is right and everyone is wrong.
I kiss him, and I am reborn.
I think,” Guinevere said, making her voice as light and breezy as the summer day around them, “I have found my new preferred form of transportation. I will never walk again. Nor shall I ride horses. I want to be carried everywhere by a king.
And part of him, a compact, dark lump of meanness buried deep in his chest, had been glad. Let her feel useless. Let her feel like a failure. Let her see that he could do things she never could.
She would never admit it to Nicolae, could barely admit it to herself, but she would stay for Mehmed. She would stay for the way she felt when his mouth or eyes were on her. And she would stay for the power it gave her.
This was not a love he had heard of, this was not a love sung by poets, celebrated in stories.
The trap was set and I was both bait and poison.
What we do now, we do so that someday mercy will be able to survive here.
Love was a weakness, a trap.
A true conversion is always only between a man and God.
Belief is not weakness. Faith is the greatest strength we can have.
The price of living seems to always be death.
Wallachia was not her mother. Wallachia did not care what happened to her. And every single person who might have was either dead or trying to kill her.
You carry too much hope, and it will canker in your soul like an infection.
I will make wherever I am my home. Or I’ll have no home at all. Either is better than living in a past and future where I don’t belong.
Love and life. Things that could be given or taken away in a heartbeat, all in the pursuit of power.
I love Wallachia. It belongs to me, and I belong to it. It is my country, and it should always be mine, and I hate any king or sultan or god or prophet that proclaims anyone else has any right to it.
It was wrong, this weighing and measuring lives as though they were coins that could be spent or saved. He longed to be free of it all, to live among men seeing everyone as his brother, to view no one as his enemy.
When you start lower, you have to fight for every scrap of space you occupy in the world... Even starting from nothing, I had more luck than you. If you had been born a boy, the whole world would tremble before you.