Quotes from Sarah Monette

He needed to feel important, needed to have power. All wizards were like that to some extent, but in few of them was it the parched craving that it was in Thaddeus.

All I knew for sure was that all the hocuses in the Mirador swore oaths on the Virtu every single day, and that was what kept the Mirador from tearing itself apart. No matter how you felt about the hocuses sitting on top of the city like a pack of vultures, you didn't want the Virtu broken.

Powers and saints, if she was any flatter, they'd be using her to pave the roads.

Isn't it what you want, to have every man who sees you desire you?

The hero wasn't me, any more than the villain was Harry McLauglin, forty-year-old forest ranger and father of two. We were just the matrices that held the pattern, the straw and clay from which myth was built. And now that we are only straw and clay again, the world does not know what to do with us.

He turned and caught me in a kiss that probably looked passionate, but was nothing more than a brutal, numbing intrusion, a blind for the compulsion he cast, winding me about in a shroud of briars, ensnaring me, so I could tell no one the truth, tell no one what he had done and how.

Flat she might be, but not stupid.

I could not tell, now, if it was my need for knowledge that drove me of the hunger of the thing that infected the tower.

There are no gardens in the Mirador. Only graveyards.

I'd fallen for Ginevra Thomas's big blue eyes, and the way she brought her chin up when she was facing something she was scared of. Stupid, Milly-Fox. Very stupid.

He gave me a look, indecipherable as all Mildmay's looks were.

I wasn't frightened of him physically, but the way he looked at me made me feel insubstantial, as if I were merely a veil between him and the woman he had desired for nearly thirty years.

Some things demand that you search for them, even though you will not find them.

The weight of darkness pressing in on us from all sides was easier to bear with his voice to listen to.

You could tell they were dancers by the way they moved from sitting to standing like they were water.

It was a woman's voice, deep and smooth with an edge on it like a knife. Vey Coruscant, Her Majesty of Blood.

I watched him, trying to decide if he was lying about how badly he was hurt, and suddenly like throwing open a pair of shutters, I saw the muscles of his back moving beneath his skin, the strength of his shoulders, the long-fingered grace of his hands. I had always known that Mildmay, despite being a good half foot shorter than I, was as muscular and agile as an acrobat, but now I saw that he was beautiful.

There's not supposed to be anything left after the end of the world, even if the end of the world doesn't quite happen.

My nerves still raw from the confronation with Astyanax, I was burningly aware of Mildmay's beauty, his bones, his grace, the walls and shadows in his eyes. Burningly aware that he was my brother and, more than that, he did not want me.

How many times do you have to learn? Don't underestimate him.

He wasn't talking to me; he sounded like somebody reciting a poem, and his eyes were wide and dreaming and stark barking mad.

All stiff and icy and prickly, like she wasn't scared half out of her mind.

I have followed Hamlet for so long, so blindly. Now that he is gone, I do not remember how to walk on my own.

She is the goddess of death, despair, stagnation, abandoned places. They say she is the only god who will protect them now, but they cannot reach her without a maze.