Quotes from Naomi Novik

If I were very offensive, do you suppose they would go away now?

A servant is easy to make dishonest when they bring you coin and never touch any themselves," he said. "Let her feel that her fortune rises with yours.

They are ours," he said, "although not properly the sailors: they are only along because we would not leave them to drown, and ought to be more grateful for it than they are. Laurence," he said, turning, "this is Palta, and that man is called Taruca: Iskierka snatched him, and I cannot find she asked him in the least.

I know i'm making her sound like something out of a story. But it was the other way around. When my mother told me stories about the spinning princess or the brave goose-girl or the river-maiden, in my head I imagined them all a little like Kasia; that was how I thought of her. And I wasn't old enough to be wise, so I loved her more, not less, because I knew she would be taken from me soon.

I thought I could smell the sorcery in him, a sharp pungent mix of cinnamon and pepper and resin of pine, and deep below it burning woodsmoke.

You learn to feel it less, child; or you learn to love other things.

I knew myself for the first time in a week, standing on earth instead of polished marble.

Darby, sir, but Janus they call me," the seaman said, "on account of a surgeon we shipped in the Sophie , a learned bloke, saying I saw both ways like some old Roman cut-up by that name.

I had people, in the plural, that I could ask to join me in the library, and even if they said no, they weren't really saying no, they were only saying not this time.

That was a story, too; they all had stories.

Temeraire:) Can one hire a translator to say things properly? Yes; they are called lawyers, Tharkay said, and laughed softly to himself.

I did not really need Magretta to tell me that love had caught my father like an unwilling fish, and having slipped the hook he had been glad to forget he had ever been on it in the first place.

But I realized now that without quite thinking it through, I'd half-imagined myself a place here in the tower. My little room upstairs, a cheerful rummaging through the laboratory and the library, tormenting Sarkan like an untidy ghost who left his books out of place and threw his great doors open, and who made him come to the spring festival and stay long enough to dance once or twice.

I do not know that the Chinese system is any worse; there is a limit to the evil one despot alone can do, and if he is truly vicious he can be overthrown; a hundred corrupt members of Parliament may together do as much injustice or more, and be the less easy to uproot.

I looked at Lukas. He did not look very pleased, but he did not look very sad either. He was only giving me a considering eye. I was a pig at the market he had decided to buy. He was hoping I fattened up well and gave him many piglets before it was time to make bacon.

No one had ever shouted at me in my life: my mother with her quiet voice, my gentle father. But I found something bitter inside myself, something of that winter blown into my heart: the sound of my mother coughing, and the memory of the story the way they'd told it in the village square so many times, about a girl who made herself a queen with someone else's gold, and never paid her debts.

Even when mundanes didn't have science to helpfully explain the world and happily burned witches at the stake, they didn't really believe in magic. If you believed in magic, you wouldn't drag a witch to the stake; you'd have her lob fireballs at your enemies instead.

So I need to know if I can get on a plane and come to you. Because that's what I want to do.

The cows were all running around their pen in manic terror.

Ouf. That's the one you went with?" she said. "Magic mirrors are for artificer-track seniors." "The others I got were worse," I said, not specifying how. I could have whipped up that frenzy orb in one session with a handful of broken glass. Oh, I'd probably also have needed the life's blood of one of my fellow students, but who's being picky?

I think my eyebrows had packed bags and migrated three counties north.

After a moment, he said, in almost marveling tones, "Are you deranged?

The creaking was every song I'd ever heard about war and battle; the horses clopping along, the drumbeat. All those stories must have ended this same way, with someone tired going home from a field full of death, but no one ever sang this part.

He says to land," Tharkay translated, with improbable brevity; at Laurence's frowning look he added, "and he calls us a great many impolite names; do you wish them all translated?