Quotes from Naomi Novik

I will never let Berkley commit treason, ever, Maximus said, but if he did, I would step on anyone who tried to hang him.

Gentleness shown once is mercy, shown twice is folly.

could have devoured the rest of the valley overnight. But a tree isn't a woman; it doesn't bear a single seed. It scatters as many of them as it can, and hopes for some of them to grow.

Do none of you ever walk ?' I asked, baffled. 'And how do you keep from getting all over mud? she said. We both looked down. I was a good two inches deep in mud along all the bottom of today's skirt: bigger around than a wagon-wheel and made of purple velvet and silver lace. 'I don't,' I said glumly.

a clean top over clean showered skin: bliss.

There's a considerable distance between seeking perfection and irretrievable haste

I was back in comfortable plain skirts again, but they looked at me anyway as they went away, not with hostility, but not the way any of them would ever have looked at a woodcutter's girl from Dvernik. It was the way I had looked at Prince Marek, at first. They looked at me and saw someone out of a story, who might ride by and be stared at, but didn't belong in their lives at all.

I needn't be offended every time I have to look at you

I'd chosen- not the lesser evil, but the less immediate one.

I think everyone else felt as I did, secretly and irrationally, that if we could only succeed, if we could only destroy the whole place, we could save ourselves from ever having been in here.

But I couldn't just be angry at her. Obviously I wanted to scream at her and set her whole enclave on fire, but that was just habit.

Temeraire-- Never fear; I am going; the Son of Heaven will not tolerate delays, and Barham gives me leave. Allegiance will carry us! Pray eat something --L.

If you will pardon my saying so, Tharkay said, you will never satisfy them on that point: the last thing you or Temeraire will ever give anyone is quiet obedience. Have you considered it might be better not to try?

Also I hadn't lost an ounce of the passionate desire to beat him over the head with a large stick, and surely that was a sign of true love.

It is not a complex problem to appear nice to people! You identify the most popular targets in each of your classes, learn what they value about themselves, and give them a minimum of three relevant compliments each week. So long as they think you are agreeable, others will follow their lead." It hadn't occurred to me that there was an answer to my question, complete presumably with regularly tended checklists.

A life before you in the moment isn't worth a hundred elsewhere, three months from now.

Success excuses all risks.

I tried to make him a young court-wizard in my mind—he almost looked the part in his fine clothes, pursuing some lovely noblewoman—and there my imagination stumbled. He was a thing of books and alembics to me, library and laboratory.

Once we're out of the Wood . . ., I said, but my voice died in my throat. I felt odd and sick. Did you ever get out of the Wood, if you'd been in it for twenty years?

I reached out my hands to them, suddenly: I put out my hand to Sergey on one side, and to Stepon on the other, and they put out their hands to me, and to each other, and we held tight, tight; we made a circle together, my brothers and me, around the food that we had been given, and there was no wolf in the room.

Bring me the winter king, and I will make you a summer queen.

And listen to me: what you've done here carries power with it, of a different sort. Don't let Solya take all the credit, and don't be shy of using it.

I grabbed back at him just as incautiously with my hand and my magic both, even as he pressed magic on me from his side as well. His breath huffed out sharply, and our workings caught on one another, magic gushing into them.

I sat down and got out my current project, an extremely bad villanelle in which I was carefully avoiding the word pestilence, which was trying so hard to shove its way into every stanza that I was sure that if I actually wrote it down, the whole thing would turn into a tidy evocation of a new plague. I'm probably the only student who tries to prevent my writing assignments from turning into new spells.