When a woman plays the fool, look for the man.
Don’t say that!” Thom drew a deep breath; everybody stared at him now. “That is dangerous talk, stupid talk. The dead can be reborn, or take a living body, and it is not something to speak of lightly.
As Tam had taught him long ago, he formed a single flame in his mind and fed his fears into it, seeking emptiness, the stillness of the void. The flame seemed to grow until it enveloped everything, until it was too large to contain or imagine any longer. With that it was gone, leaving in its place a sense of peace. At its edges, emotions still flickered, fear and anger like black blotches, but the void held. Thought skimmed across its surface like pebbles across ice.
The Light shine on you, Lord Ingtar of House Shinowa, and may you shelter in the palm of the Creator’s hand.” He touched Ingtar’s shoulder. “The last embrace of the mother welcome you home.
Trouble is, you’re caught up in the fringes of politics, lad, even if it’s none of your doing, and politics is a foggy mire full of snakes.
The winds of destiny are blowing, Siuan, and we must ride them where they take us.
How people see you first is what they hold hardest in their minds. It is the way of the world. You can step down from a throne, and even if you behave like a farmer in a pigsty, some part in each of them will remember that you did descend from a throne. But if they see only a young man first, a country man, they will resent him stepping up to his throne later, whatever his right, whatever his power.
But sometimes the change chooses you, or the Wheel chooses it for you. And sometimes the Wheel bends a life-thread, or several threads, in such a way that all the surrounding threads are forced to swirl around it, and those force other threads, and those still others, and on and on.
When she drifted off, she was thinking of Ryne, strangely. A pity if he was afraid of her, now. A great pity if he turned out to be a Darkfriend. He was charming, and quite pretty, really. She did not mind a man wanting to see her unclothed, only his telling others about it.
You can’t patch a hull when the whole boat’s burned.
They have no Aes Sedai touching the True Source to protect them. Blacksmith, perhaps the walls have weakened enough for the Dark One himself to touch events. Not with a free hand, or we’d be done already, but maybe tiny shiftings in the threads. A chance turning of one corner instead of another, a chance meeting, a chance word, or what seems like chance, and they could be so far under the Shadow not even Moiraine could bring them back.
Sing of Manetheren, the sword that could not be broken.
The same.” The guardsman raised his eyes to Mat’s. “But you will no be crossing, lad, east or west. Your name do be Matrim Cauthon, or Fortune abandon me.
Hopper sent to him, but you are here too strongly, and too long from your body.
But trust is the color of a dark seed growing. Trust is the color of a heart’s blood flowing. Trust is the color of a soul’s last breath. Trust is the color of death.
Aemon had sent out messengers. Aid was promised if they could hold for but three days at the Tarendrelle. Hold for three days against odds that should overwhelm them in the first hour. Yet somehow, through bloody assault and desperate defense, they held through an hour, and the second hour, and the third. For three days they fought, and though the land became a butcher’s yard, no crossing of the Tarendrelle did they yield.
The Creator had made the world and then left humankind to make of it what they would, a heaven or the Pit of Doom by their choosing. The Creator had made many worlds, watched each flower or die, and gone on to make endless worlds beyond. A gardener did not weep for each blossom that fell.
It was easier to ask forgiveness, than permission.
The mighty tell the lesser to dig in the mud and keep their own hands clean.
Faile was the only woman Perrin wanted, but sometimes he felt like a fish trying to understand a bird.