Quotes from Naomi Novik

It's always mattered a lot to me to keep a wall up round my dignity, even though dignity matters fuck-all when the monsters under your bed are real.

I couldn't be his savior; I had enough to do saving myself.

The water-dragon's name was Lady Kiyomizu, although much to Junichiro's horror she breezily told Laurence to call her Kiyo, and not to stand on formality. "You have no manners anyway," she said, "and there is no sense your trying to put out sakura blossoms, when you are a bamboo.

And then finally the magic flowed, but not the same way as when the Dragon's spell-lessons dragged it in a rush out of me. Instead it seemed to me the sound of the chanting became a stream made to carry magic along, and I was standing by the water's edge with a pitcher that never ran dry, pouring a thin silver line into the rushing current.

And I want to help my family, I want to take care of them…but I can't be that girl. I can't be the smart girl. I can only be me.

So the next morning, I had the deeply wretched experience of seeing Prince Marek stop outside the tower doors to look up to my window and blow me a cheerful and indiscreet kiss. 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.

If I ever did go maleficer, if I ever did start pulling malia out of people like toffee and tossing off those killing spells of mine left and right, I'd be unstoppable. Maybe literally. Raining death and destruction on all the enclaves of the world like a maw-mouth myself, like the biggest maw-mouth ever, tearing the others apart because they were my competition.

They were already vulnerable, so when they looked at me they were rabbits looking at a wolf - a half-starved wolf who sometimes snapped even at the hand that fed her because it also kept her on a leash.

They cut them down. They will always cut them down. They come and go like seasons, the winter that gives no thought to the spring

Mum always told me that you couldn't know what people would do in a crisis, but I'd thought she just meant you should forgive people for behaving like weasels under bad circumstances, not that a stale biscuit like Khamis might suddenly come over all heroic in a tight corner.

However, I must disagree with you very strongly that providing ordinary and reasonable care in any way constitutes coddling, and I have always found that deprivation and hardship, when necessary, can be better endured by men who have not been subjected to them previously for no cause.

She'd remembered the wrong things, and forgotten too much. She'd remembered how to kill and how to hate, and she'd forgotten how to grow.

I held that last gown of plain undyed wool in my hands, feeling like it was a rope I was clinging to, and then in a burst of defiance I left it on my bead, and pulled myself in the green-and-russet gown. I couldn't fasten the buttons in the back, so I took the long veil from the headdress, wound it twice around my waist and made a knot, just barely good enough to keep the whole thing from falling off me, and marched downstairs to the kitchens. I didn't even try to keep myself clean this time.

Let her out! I screamed at the tree. I beat on its trunk with my muddy fists. Let her out, or I'll bring you down! Fulmia ! I cried out in rage . . .

What I mean—what we mean by it is—it's like credit," I said, suddenly thinking of my grandfather. "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.

You'd rather run away and wallow in angst than ask for help or anything else horrible like that.

then he spluttered at me, "You impossible, wretched, nonsensical contradiction, what on earth have you done now?" I

We are not going to be herded anywhere we do not like," [Temeraire] said, dangerously, "by Napoleon or by your admirals; and if you like to ask the other dragons of the Corps to try it, I expect they will see at once how very foolish it is, and if not, I will explain it to them, and I daresay they will join us instead.

It felt like a war between two endless things, between a bottomless chasm and a running river.

He is mine, too.

I had hated him, but I wouldn't have reproached him, any more than I would have reproached a bolt of lightning for striking my house. 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.

But none of that matters at all." His head raised to stare balefully at me, but I said, incoherent yet convinced, "It's just—a way to go. There isn't only one way to go." I waved at his notes. "You're trying to find a road where there isn't one. It's like—it's gleaning in the woods," I said abruptly. "You have to pick your way through the thickets and the trees, and it's different every time.

Lady, though you choose a home in the sunlit world, you are a Staryk queen indeed.

They would have devoured my family and picked their teeth with the bones, and never been sorry at all. Better to be turned to ice by the Staryk, who didn't pretend to be a neighbor.