Respond to demands with silence, respond to challenges with questions.
You are a fine judge of character, child. You must have done well as the Wisdom of your village. It was Laras who went to Sheriam and demanded to know how long you three are to be kept to the dirtiest and hardest work, without a turn at lighter. She said she would not be a party to breaking any woman’s health or spirit, no matter what I said. A fine judge of character, child.
There were questions one asked, and questions one did not. That was strong custom. And friendship.
She grimaced, remembering one incarnation when she and he had been forced to grow old together, peacefully. Most boring life she’d ever known, though at the time – ignorant of her grander part in the Pattern – she’d been happy with it.
I’ve seen men die because they were sure that what should not happen, would not.
Women lied to get a man into bed, and they lied worse once they had him there.
Most people were more willing to talk about fighting than to do it, especially against soldiers.
Yamada might be a good general – Mat did not know – but he had never stood a chance against Riselle and that marvelous bosom.
If a sword had memory, it might be grateful to the forge fire, but never fond of it.
Wildfire did not run through dry woods as fast as gossip ran through women.
With experience comes a determination to be set in your ways, to avoid new experiences.
Change what you can if it needs changing, but learn to live with what you can’t change.
Tuon looked at him, squatting there by the map, moving his fingers over its surface, and suddenly she saw him in a new light. A buffoon? No. A lion stuffed into a horse-stall might look like a peculiar joke, but a lion on the high plains was something very different. Toy was loose on the high plains, now. She felt a chill. What sort of man had she entangled herself with? After all this time, she realized, she had hardly a clue.
The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
Not all options will be good ones. Sometimes you have to make the best of a bad lot and ride the storm.
He expected the other man to be dead – not many could survive a thirty-foot fall to cobblestones with another’s weight on top of him – but what he had not expected was to see the fellow’s dagger driven to the hilt into his own heart. Such an ordinary-looking man to have tried to kill him. Mat did not think he would even have noticed him in a crowded room.
One of the first rules he’d learned in life was to never fight a man when you had an equal chance of losing.
She probably told the thunder to be quiet. It probably did.
Peel the apple in your hand, girl, not the one on the tree, Lini’s thin voice seemed to whisper in her ear. Tears are for after; they just waste time before.
Small courtesies were the lubricant of daily life.