Quotes from Naomi Novik

But as if I'd told myself at the same time as him, I realized that was exactly what I was after. I wanted Sarkan. I wanted him to look up from among his heaped books and snap at me at the disorder I'd created. I wanted to know what he was doing, if the Wood had struck back. I wanted him to tell me how I could persuade the king to let Kasia go.

There's something nearby," she said. "Something up ahead." The captain heard her and glanced back. "Something dangerous?" "Something dead," Kasia said, and dropped her eyes to her saddle, her hands clenched on the reins.

There's something worse than monsters in that place: something that makes monsters.

Y gracias a mi rabieta de la otra noche, este también ha descubierto que soy una bruja oscura de dimensiones apocalípticas en potencia. Teniendo todo eso en cuenta, me juego lo que sea a que todos sus instintos clamaban para que detuviera mi todavía inexistente reinado del terror. Naturalmente

They learned the wrong things. But if we stay, if we fight, we will remember the wrong things. And then we would become… We decided that we would rather not remember.

tipped backwards

There were those lines at the corners of his eye and mouth, if I looked for them, but that was all that betrayed his years. In everything else, he was a young man: the still-hard edges of his profile, his dark hair untouched with silver, his pale smooth unweathered cheek, his long and graceful hands.

The hot stifling room had gone even more stifling, a thickness like the worst days of summer, the air hot and moist under a smothering weight of still leaves that stopped the wind from ever getting through.

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.

high magic: magic that came only when you made some larger version of yourself with words and promises, and then stepped inside and somehow grew to fill it.

I was angry at them for everything they'd done to build it, and I also couldn't stand to just turn my back and let it all come tumbling down. It wouldn't have fixed anything they'd done. It would only have made an even worse waste of it all.

was still young and foolish enough at the time to believe myself and my magic likely to elicit admiration instead of alarm, and

Was a lesson to everyone that being a witch was not the same thing as being wise.

You have fed each other, and you kept the wolf away.

Spend one and save one; you remember the wise man's rule

Think on it with a clear head. Lords and kings often don't ask for what they want, but they can afford to have bad manners.

There's no such thing as normal people," I said, a desperate flailing. "There's just people, and some of them are miserable, and some of them are happy, and you've the same right to be happy as any of them—no more and no less.

And I was so tired of being afraid all the time. It felt like I had been afraid and afraid without stopping forever.

The power in the Wood isn't some blind hating beast; it can think and plan, and work towards its own ends. It can see into the hearts of men, all the better to poison them.

Better to make no bargain than a bad one, and be thought of forever as an easy mark.

No one had cared what I wanted, or whether I was happy. I'd had to find my own way to anything I wanted. I'd never been grateful for that before now, when what I wanted was my life.

I'll come with you," Kasia said, and linked her arm in mine to support me: she could tell I needed the help, without a word said.

Their law didn't seem to allow for mistakes, and if you couldn't make what you said true, they'd repair the fault in the world by putting you out of it.

I knew that no matter what there would be no mercy to it, no kindness allowed. You couldn't return a kindness after you were dead.