Quotes from Rachel Hartman

I don't mean to imply that they were cowards...," Maurizio said, shrugging, clearly implying that [they] were cowards.

O faithless ignoramus, denier of Heaven Sitting smugly upon a disbelieving bottom O blatant person who disregards the scriptures Standing confidently in a puddle of sin There shall be smiting with lightning And blood-soaked retribution And heads kicked about like footballs And much worse upon your wretched person When Golden Abaster returns with judgment for you And salvation in the form of flowers for the rest of us Rodya

Dragons aren't good at metaphor.

He chuckled into my hair, enjoying this. I loved him terribly just then, how he puzzled through obscure scholarship and reveled in ideas, never mind that he'd called my mind hell.

It was hard to fool someone who could tell what you were thinking.

You are the traveler, taking this journey. You are the hero, writing this story. When the trickster Pau-Henoa wandered under the earth, what did he find?" "The sun," "Right," said Chessey firmly. "Even the pagans knew: you will wander the dark places under the earth, but you will come back with the sun.

That's the secret to performance: conviction. The right note played tentatively still misses its mark, but play boldly and no one will question you. If one believes there is truth in art—and I do—then it's troubling how similar the skill of performing is to lying. Maybe lying is itself a kind of art. I think about that more than I should.

No penance could be more terrible than this. Her very heart was dead.

There are two sacred causes in this world," he said, holding up his pinkie and ring finger. "Chance and necessity. By chance, I was there to help when you had need.

You are all that is left of Lynn. Her own people won't even say her name. I... I value your continued existence." I could not speak. He had pierced me to my very heart.

Music is only work if someone else makes you do it.

rest of the court, to watch the Golden Plays?" "I can't. Tomorrow is dress rehearsal for the Treaty Eve concert.

Everything beautiful felt like a fist clamped around Tess's heart, squeezing.

She was just on the verge of recapturing the feeling, how she had brought the cleaver down unflinchingly, how she had been tragic and mighty, and in that moment how her bones had chipped and shattered, but it was all done in an instant. Severed.

And there are no years without plague. Some years it doesn't reach the rich, but it always lurks among the poor.

Your lies didn't stop me loving you; your truth hasn't stopped me either.

But are the serpents real, or just a story?" Pathka's eyes swiveled quizzically. "There's nothing 'just' about stories. Stories are the most real.

Well, listen, I want to talk to Rynald a bit more-" "About astronomy? Maybe he'll show you his telescope,

For the merest moment I couldn't breathe. Something inside me quivered, some oud string plucked by his words, and if I breathed it would stop. He did not know the truth of me, yet he had perceived something true about me that no one else had ever noticed. And in spite of that—or perhaps because of it—he believed me good, believed me worth taking seriously, and his belief, for one vertiginous moment, made me want to be better than I was.

sprinted past him up the stairs, toward the royal family's wing of the palace.

Kiggs. "You were just a squire when they were banished; technically, you weren't banished at all." Maurizio

I'd found my people and they weren't even mine.

Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that's like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can come to genuinely moral conclusions by our own paths.

of love. Yes, that was it: he thought I meant to proposition