Quotes from Megan Whalen Turner

Nothing mortal makes last; nothing the gods make endures forever.

It was like being lectured by an earnest, oversized child.

That sort of news travels faster than horses, faster than boats. The messengers of the gods carry rumors through the sky the way bees carry pollen and drop them from their wings onto the earth below.

Of course the servants had chosen not to follow me; I'd failed them already by refusing to be a man they could believe in.

the call of life is as powerful as the call of death, and it is no weakness to answer to it," she said quietly.

They are all accepted," I said. It wasn't important anymore.

Unable to guess the answer, she asked, 'Who am I, that you should love me?' 'You are my Queen,' said Eugenides. She sat perfectly still, looking at him without moving as his words dropped like water into dry earth. 'Do you believe me?' he asked. 'Yes,' she answered. 'Do you love me?' 'Yes.' 'I love you.' And she believed him.

He shrugged. We all spend our time under the sign of the idiot, he said, and the matter seemed settled, at least as far as he was concerned.

As quiet slowly returned to the palace, Attolia found the king in her bedroom peeling off his wet clothes. Unkingly, she said. My god, I hope so, said the king.

Pol knew," said Sophos from the window.

But the call of life is as powerful as the call of death, and it is no weakness to answer to it," she said quietly.

Ion, I'm sorry. I apologize (...) Your Majesty! Are you ill? he demanded You have been quiet this morning. And now you are being... amiable.

I'm sure everyone has something about themselves they'd like to change. To dance better, sing better, be stronger or taller. Zikhos snickered. The kings occasional touchiness about his height was well known. The king must have heard, because he said: In Zikhos's case: being smarter than a burnt steak.

The king shouted I think I've broken something!!! Nothing important, I'm sure. she called back My pride!!! She laughed.

We have a saying in my country that a beautiful woman deserves love. (...) Ugly women do not? asked the queen as if genuinely curious.

You are Eddis. Go smack him! Eddis shook her head. Smacking people will not persuade them.

He couldn't know that I'd overstayed my welcome one night while creeping through his megaron and had crawled up through the space where the pipes of the hypocaust ran to hide in his treasure room. I had slept for a day in stuffy darkness on the ridged tops of his treasure trunks.

My father thinks that we should forget the old gods. He says that a country with two sets of gods is like a country with two kings. No one knows which to be loyal to.

All the things man has made are eventually destroyed.

And she had the most appealing of feminine virtues, especially in a queen. She's easily led.

Oh how inconspicuous I will be when next I am in Attolia, he said out loud, dressed in Eddisan formalwear with gold frogs on the front.

He would go east and fight the emperor's wars, carrying out the bloody business of larger countries eating up the littler ones. It wasn't a matter of theory in a tiny office in the emperor's palace. It was the work of their lives and the end of many of them.

To pass time, I concentrated on pleasant memories, laying them out in order and examining them carefully.

No one on the verge of death has the strength to pile one foul word on top of another like a man compiling a layered pastry of obscene language, from the bottom of the step all the way to the top.