People have to attempt to do right, even if they believe they cannot succeed.
For too many, when they get their dream, they discover it is not what they wanted. Or the dream is bigger than their abilities, and all ends in bitterness.
How could the whole world not be as broken as I was?
And the world re-ordered itself around me. I spoke each word carefully. ‘You are so stupid.
Justice. There’s a thing we shall ever thirst after, and ever be parched.
Amber?” he said pleadingly. His voice went high on her name and broke, as it sometimes did when he was afraid. “Are you taking my beads away?
A boy is a man when he proves himself to be one, but a girl is a woman when she desires to be one.
Worrying doesn’t solve anything. I know that. In one way I know it but in another it seems wrong. It seems that if I don’t think about all the things that hurt, all the things I’ve done wrong, then I don’t really care.
Many great ideas are not unique. They only become unique when the men who have the wherewithal actually to implement them come together.
And that is what you would truly wish, little one? To stop being yourself, before you have even completed yourself? There is so much more you could grow to be.
Even if you do only a little damage, they will learn that touching you has a price. Some will not be willing to pay it. I.
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.
All this guilt and shame and remorse you carry, Kestrel. Don’t you see? That is what they burned you with. And you have added to it, all these years. The wall is of your own making. Take it down. Forgive yourself. Come out.
Patience had once counseled me that the best way to stop pitying myself was to do something for someone else.
There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it.
For time is the great enslaver of us all.
If it was raining soup, you’d be out there with a fork.
Sometimes, when one goes back to the scene of one’s childhood, things seem smaller. What was mysterious and the sole province of adults suddenly seems commonplace and mundane when viewed with mature eyes.
We are here, Fitz, you and I, to change the future of the world. To reach out and hold in place the tiny pebble that could trigger the boulder’s tumbling.
Perhaps the greatest thing one can discover is that you can decide who you are. You don’t have to be whom the Ludlucks made you. You don’t even have to be who you were before that. You can choose. We are all creatures of our own devising.