Quotes from Naomi Novik

Some sorcerers get an affinity for weather magic, or transformation spells, or fantastic combat magics like dear Orion. I got an affinity for mass destruction.

You feel like it's going to rain.

And on the wedding contract, before me and my parents and the rabbi, and Wanda and Sergey for our witnesses, in silver ink he signed his name. But I won't ever tell you what it is.

Justice is expensive. That is why there is so little of it, and it is reserved for those few with enough money and influence to afford it.

He wasn't a person, he was a lord and a wizard, a strange creature on another plane entirely, as far removed as storms and pestilence.

He snorted. "He thinks killing a day-old hydra has made him a hero." None of the songs had ever mentioned the Vandalus Hydra being one day old: it diminished the story more than a little.

A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true

You have to ration sympathy and grief in here the way you ration school supplies.

My anger's a bad guest, my mother likes to say: comes without warning and stays a long time.

I am beginning to feel the need of a glass of wine to fortify myself against this conversation.

There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies. That is what was in your house with you, all your life. But here you are with your brothers, and you are not eaten up, and there is not a wolf inside you. You have fed each other, and you kept the wolf away.

You're the only right thing I've ever wanted.

There was only me to save me, because no one else cared.

Next you will cry about taxation without representation, and throw a basket of tea into the harbor. You are indeed a very Jacobin at heart, and I think I must give up trying to cure you of it; I can but wash my hands and deny responsibility

It seems to me after a fellow has been mutinied against three or four times, there is something to it besides bad luck.

And we must still try or we would be leaving our friends to fight without us. I think this is what you have meant by duty, all along; I do understand, at least this much of it.

They come and go like seasons, the winter that gives no thought to the spring.

Why would you ask for a spell like that!" "What I asked for was a spell to light my room, you twat, that's what I got." To be fair, the incarnate flame was in fact doing a magnificent job of lighting the room.

He roared at me furiously for ten minutes after he finally managed to put out the sulky and determined fire, calling me a witless muttonheaded spawn of pig farmers-My father's a wood-cutter, I said- adOf axe-swinging lummocks! he snarled.

I wouldn't hold myself that cheap, to marry a man who'd love me less than everything else he had, even if what he had was a winter kingdom.

She was safe for another moment, one more moment, and all of life was only moments, after all.

Two lords and an archduke had asked her to marry them, and so, she wrote to me in outrage, had Solya. Can you imagine? I told him I thought he was a lunatic, and he said he would live in hope. Alosha laughed for ten minutes without stopping except to cough when I told her . . .

No one was enchanted beyond saving in the songs. The hero always saved them. There was no ugly moment in a dark cellar where the countess wept and cried out protest while three wizards put the count to death, and then made court politics out of it.

I remembered when my oldest brother married Malgosia, and suddenly the two of them stopped running around with us and started sitting with the parents: a very solemn kind of alchemy, one that I felt shouldn't have been able to just sneak up on me.