Quotes from Cinda Williams Chima

If he even survives." She shivered, and Amon put his arm around her, drawing her into his steady warmth. "It's that bad?" Raisa nodded. "He looked...he looked awful, Amon. Willo doesn't know if he'll...She's worried about him. My mother died, and I never got to tell her that I loved her, that I finally understood - just a little anyway. If Han dies too, I don't know what I'll do.

As I said, history is written by the victors. The truth is, the villains were less villainous, and the heroes less heroic, than you've been told.

The problem is, hope is the thing that can't be reined in by rules or pinned down by bitter experience. It's a blessing and curse.

She padded toward Han, barefoot, like a faerie startled out of a forest bower, bewitching mix of clan and flatland beauty.

You lying lunatic bastard. They're going to kill you." "I love you too," he murmured. "Go find Seph.

Both Averill and Bayar were like actors speaking lines for their audience and not to each other.

One more thing: Linda, can you get to Canterbury and take over my Chaucerian Society? They're at Dovecote Hostelry in the old city. We're visiting all the scenes of the great murders. Tomorrow they want to see where Becket was killed. They're a bloodthirsty lot, it seems.

Grief was like that. It gradually faded into a dull ache, until some simple sight or sound or scent hit him like a hammer blow.

The human mind had a remarkable ability both to discount what it sees and make reality conform to expectation.

Maybe the hardest lesson Han had learned was that nobody is purely bad or good. Everybody seemed to be a mixture of both.

What could she tell him? I notice everything about him, from his flawed nose to his battle scars to his eyes as blue as an upland lake at midsummer. Sometimes I see the boy he would have been had it not been for his life at Ragmarket. He wears his pain on his face in unguarded moments; at other times, I can see just how dangerous he is. No, she couldn't say any of that.

We spend so much of our lives waiting to be ambushed by heartbreak. Why couldn't we be ambushed by joy?

For Hanalea the Warrior!

You look like a boy who has eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge and doesn't like the taste.

It was one of the warm nights at the end of summer that makes promises that won't be kept.

It's not about what people think. It's about who you are.

It was a peculiar marriage of interests- Lord Averill and Captain Byrne and Lord Bayar and Han Alister agreeing on anything was as rare as gold in Ragmarket.

As for my family, my father was Danel; he died as a mercenary in the southern wars," Han went on. "My mother's name was Sarah, called Sali, and my sister was Mari. They died last summer. But then, you already knew that. Every time you forget, I'll remind you. That's the blood sacrifice I made to be here, and that's enough.

One bright day in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight. They drew their swords and shot each other. A deaf police man heard the noise, and ran to save the two dead boys. And if you don't believe it's true, ask the blind man, he saw it too.

Love is the root of so much suffering and misery, so much loss. It's the worst thing in the world, to risk yourself by loving someone. At the same time, it's the best thing in the world—and worth the risk.

She's tough for a blueblood, he'd thought, a lifetime ago. Maybe tough enough to be with him. He hadn't considered that he might not be tough enough to be with her.

Which is a sad thing when you're only seventeen.

Complicated. And yet—simple. They were like two pieces of a failed star, drawn together by a shared history and a memory of illicit kisses.

Either he's lying, which is bad. Or he could be telling the truth, which is worse