Quotes from Naomi Novik

The French seized his arms and put a blade to his throat, calling to Eroica, "Geben Sie oben

A robber who steals a knife and cuts himself cannot cry out against the woman who kept it sharp." He

I had a feeling the 'Summoning' wasn't really meant to be cast alone: as if truth didn't mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn't come and listen.

There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies.

it had the feeling of truth, of something that I'd always known and just hadn't ever put into words, or of explaining clearly and plainly something I'd never understood.

Here I had no idea what I was even meant to do, and if I didn't like it, still, I wanted to neglect my duties deliberately, and not just because I was a stupid girl who didn't know what they were.

You have not paid for this victory, false one, cheat, and I will give you nothing.

I didn't feel I owed him beauty.

It's like—it's gleaning in the woods. . . You have to pick your way through the thickets and the trees, and it's different every time.

I'd been watching only to be sure he actually left; it took nearly all the caution left in me not to throw something down at his head, and I don't mean a token of my regard.

Gifts, and thanks—we'll accept from someone what they can give then, and make return to them when it's wanted, if we can. And there are some cheats, and some debts aren't paid, but others are paid with interest to make up for it, and we can all do the more for not having to pay as we go.

I should rather have you than a heap of gold, even if it were very comfortable to sleep on," Temeraire said. "I do not mind the deck.

Don't make mournful faces at me," he added.

Maybe he would let me come in, but he'd want to close the doors up again behind me.

they will not be so foolish." "Men can be very foolish indeed," Laurence said, "and I must, I do, beg you not to enter into a resolution, which should prevent my being able to face death with equanimity. You should make me a coward, if I must fear that my death should turn you against my country." "But I do not at all want you to face death with equanimity

I wasn't sorry they didn't like me, I wasn't sorry I had been hard to them. I was glad, fiercely glad. They had wanted me to bury my mother and leave my father behind to die alone. They had wanted me to go be a beggar in my grandfather's house, and live the rest of my days a quiet mouse in the kitchen. They would have devoured my family and picked their teeth with the bones, and never been sorry at all. Better

He began to weep and make protests, but I didn't have the strength to

each one of them was a story whose unhappy ending hadn't been written yet, and in its place I'd inscribed one line with my own hand: And then they graduated from the Scholomance.

Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melech haolam, shelo hasair b'olamo kloom, ubara bo briyot tovot v'ilanot tovot, leihanot bahem b'nai adam

We may meet again; the world is not after all so very large a place." He

Yancy was the only name she used, and whenever a scruffier sort of wizard came to the commune looking for help, more often than not they said she'd sent them, with her respects. Once, I'd asked why, and Mum told me she'd helped her resolve a corruption of perception that had lodged itself too deep into her imagination. If that doesn't tell you much, just avoid consuming too many alchemical substances in unreal spaces and it won't happen to you.

One day when I was ten one of our neighbors came to the house and said that the tsar was dead and when I asked what ir meant they said that there would be a new tsar. So I did not really see why a tsar mattered.

Your Majesty, I am a soldier, not a statesman; and I have no great philosophy but that I love my country. I came because it was my duty as a Christian and a man; now it is my duty to return.

I was seeing whispers and wind chimes — not solid wind chimes dangling, which would have been all right; I was seeing the sound of wind chimes, and don't ask me to describe it.