Myles hugged her tightly, taking care not to bump her wounded arm. “You’re a good lad, Alan of Trebond,” he whispered. “You give an old man hope.” “Nonsense,” Alanna growled, pleased and embarrassed by the unexpected praise. “You aren’t that old. And I’m not that good a lad.
It occurred to Keth for the first time that perhaps magic wasn’t simply a matter of fires, lightning, and power in the air, if spoken words could also create such a transformation.
Why do boys say someone acts like a girl as if it were an insult?” Alanna shook her head, smiling a little. In the three years she had been disguised as a boy, she had learned that boys know girls as little as girls know boys. It didn’t make sense – people are people, after all, she thought – but that was how things were.
You can smack some people in the face with a haddock and they’ll still call it a mouse if a mouse is what they want to see.
He knows about things like betrayal, and being afraid, and the looks on people’s faces when they know you did something they thought impossible.
They are sparkly,” Nawat said. “The griffins shed them. I thought if I brought you a present that was made of discarded things, no one would punish you for having them.
If thanks was what I wanted,” Sandry replied in the same language, “I would be sad indeed. Since I don’t want it, I won’t miss it.
Beneath her calm exterior she wished fiercely that she could pound the meanness out of Joren. Even as she thought it, she knew she would do better to ignore him. Water, she thought, collecting her staff from the shed where it was kept. I am a summer lake on a windless day, clear, cool, and still. Joren is a cloud. All he can do is cast a shadow on my surface. I’ll be here long after he’s gone.
No one asks to live in squalor, Tris. It is just that squalor is all that is left to them by those who have money.
People are jackals, always willing to feed off someone else’s kill.
It was like trying to balance on a pair of knife blades. Who had thought of this mad form of travel in the first place? And why had no one locked them up before they passed their dangerous ideas on to others?
You come from a race that spends more time murdering your own kind than do all the immortals put together, yet you insist you are better than us.
Don’t we teach our women to view all men according to the actions of a few?
What good is magic, if you can’t use it to help people?
All things change,” she told Alanna frankly. “It does not hurt men to know women have power, too.
It’s a Stormwing,” Ozorne said. “I always wanted one.
It was plain that Nazaam and Gieyat were lovers. I’d like that, Arram thought as he followed Nazaam. To be comfortable with my lover, and laugh together, even when things are terrible. Like I do with Ozorne and Varice.
Come on, Stork Boy, aren’t you excited?
They aren’t expected to understand one another, he replied. The women will learn to flirt over a friend’s shoulder, instead of close. The men will see the women as distant and unknowable. Their friends will be only men. The women will see men as strong and unknowable. Their friends will be only women.
And I think Alanna would quote Sean Connery from “The Untouchables” to you: “At the end of your shift, go home alive.” She would say, Don’t think about being brave or working hard – just do what you need to do. When you look back, you’ll be surprised to see that this was exactly enough.