Quotes from Sharon Shinn

For the world slows and the stars falter, and all that remains is you...

I've remembered that most of life is about small, essential connections, so unobtrusive, so elastic, that you scarcely realize they're actually holding you together. The big ones-the great, grand emotional bonds-those are the ones that break, the ones that fail you, the ones that give way and send you careening toward the foot of the bleak and jagged canyon. It's the tough, gnarled, unadorned ties that really do bind, that never let you fall all the way down into darkness.

He is so kind that he makes me search my soul to find new ways to be compassionate to others.

He looked down at his empty glass. "One of the other ways in which I am different from my father," he said. "I am not interested in marrying where I do not love." I spoke in a jesting voice. "And of all the women in the eight provinces, you have not been able to find one you could love?" Now he looked at me again, and his face was completely serious. "That's the problem," he said. "There is one.

I am who I am, born that way, and will die that way.

I realized a long time ago, with a certain amazement, that no mattter how important something is in your life, no matter how huge it is, how much space it takes up in your heart and in your thoughts, unless you mention it to other people, they have no idea it exists.

Yet the world is the same as it always was. It is merely that you see it with new eyes.

She should leave you. Or you shouldn't leave her. I haven't worked it out yet. But you shouldn't be apart.

Your wedding completely changes the direction of your life, you know, no matter how greatly you desire it. I think that moment of doubt and faintness comes from all those imagined and now impossible futures all pressing in on you at once. It is your last chance to experience them, you see, and they all want to be lived at that moment.

she had something I could not have, and so I resented her—but I realized the fault was mine and not hers.

You must welcome bounty whenever it comes, hunti man. It is often inconvenient. But if you insist on accepting it only when it suits your schedule, you will find yourself very poor.

Do you love me?" he asked. I fell silent. "For the rest of it is glitter and noise," he said. "At the heart of it all is love. You make that choice, and you go forward from there.

I'm fascinated by the idea of disparate, difficult people learning to trust each other when they're thrust into hellish circumstances.

A truth comes out when it must; A dream comes true when it will. Though the world turn to ash and dust A secret's a secret still.

And might I live long enough to see the world yet again as a place completely different, through eyes that see another truth not yet revealed?

Everybody's afraid of love, because love is what hurts the most.

Yes, Jenna, I love you with all my heart. And with my atoms and molecules and electrons and whatever further breakdown you require.

Manufactured--synthetic--even virtual, if that is what you turned out to be--I would love you.

My love for you is elemental and immutable, and it will sustain me until I die.

I thought it would not hurt to remind you that love is a powerful force in this world, invisible though it seems.

Love is a popular romantic notion that leads to nothing but its own brand of misery.

There's no future in loving people who are hurt. If you heal them, they don't need you anymore. If you don't heal them, they destroy you.