Quotes from Barbara Hambly

She had come to terms with her lack of beauty, but never with her lack of genius in the single thing she had ever wanted.

However, her own lack of power had taught her a curious appreciation for small joys and hard beauties and for the simple, changeless patterns of life and death.

After long years of solitary meditation, Jenny had come to accept that, for her, magic was a depth and a stillness rather than the moving brilliance that it was for the great.

The key to magic is magic, Caerdinn had said. To be a mage, you must be a mage. There is no time for anything else, if you will come to the fullness of your power.

The pursuit of your power takes all that you have, if you will be great—it leaves neither time, nor energy, for anything else. We are born with the seeds of power in us and driven to be what we are by a hunger that knows no slaking.

She felt angry enough to curse them, but in her heart she knew that she could lay no greater curse upon them than to be what they already were.

If any town in Europe would have vampires, he knew it would be Prague.

Scholarship, religion, philosophy—they were killing matters in those days, and at that time I was still close enough to my human habits of thought to be concerned about the outcome of the invasion. And too, it was still respectable among scholars to be a warrior, and among warriors to be a scholar, which it is no longer, as I'm sure you know.

The worst thing about knowing that Gary Fairchild had been dead a month was seeing him every day at work.

The Dead always find ways," Ysidro said, "to get the living to serve them.

She had killed literally hundreds of men, usually for business reasons, but had never learned to deal with them in a one-sided amatory situation.

It is a terrible mistake to put the rifles of tomorrow into the hands of the ignorance of yesterday.

Slavery, January understood now as he never had before, made you fear change almost more than anything else.

You mean magic is predicated on hope?" "Hope," [Antryg] said, "and belief in life. We move blindly from second to second through time. Hope and magic both involve the casting forward of the soul. In a way, both magic and hope are a kind of madness.

I sometimes believe that the ability to survive on the memory of joy—or to transmit it—is the quality that most clearly separates the human from the beast.

Hidden within the heart of the great rose of music, he could forget time and place, forget the sting of his cut lip and the white man who'd given it to him, who had the right by law to give it to him; forget the whole of this past half year. For as long as he could remember, music had been his refuge, when grief and pity and rage and incomprehension of the whole of the bleeding world overwhelmed him: It had been a retreat, like the gentle hypnotism of the Rosary.

She understood that even the worst days contained only twenty-four hours. One did what one had to do to get through them, and afterwards, one slept.

We command the fire and the serpents and the stinging insects, but we cannot wield the power that sends fever away.

If a man's been beat, and his woman's been raped, by any man, white or black or purple, you think that man's going to see God's face the way the man who wronged him tells him it is? God finds all sorts of ways to speak to those that need Him, Ben. He's a man with a sword, to those that need a rod and staff to comfort them, whether that man's called Ogu or St. James. He's the man with the keys in his hand to those that're in chains and seeking a way through the door to heaven.

But he had made his choice and had patiently put his life to rights afterward, though it had been years before he could sit through certain songs.

Luke talks about the power that lies in the dark side. The Force isn't the only thing that has a dark side, Han. And the tricky thing about the dark side is that it's so easy to use—and it gets you what you think you want.

the jury was overwhelmed by the tangle of conflicting tales of Austrian spies, slave-smugglers, mysterious veiled ladies, nameless hired bravos, Italian politics, and enraged divas

Love-charms were easily manufactured anyway: you just wrapped a piece of paper bearing the words "I love you" around ten or twelve gold pieces, and there you were. In an emergency you could dispense with the paper.

The pursuit of your power takes all that you have, if you will be great—it leaves neither time, nor energy, for anything else. We are born with the seeds of power in us and driven to be what we are by a hunger that knows no slaking. Knowledge—power—to know what songs the stars sing; to center all the forces of creation upon a rune drawn in the air—we can never give over the seeking of it. It is the stuff of loneliness.