Quotes from Megan Whalen Turner

Only through pain can you be sure of the truth

Ever since the gods created the world, mortals have been forgetting from where their blessings come.

Attolia had brushed Eugenides's cheek almost shyly before sending him with a wave back to his own couch.

Costis, I am speechless! Not noticeably, Your Majesty.

To make war you need three things: one, money; two, money; and three, money.

It was a race between the tortoise and the hare, but the tortoise had just enough head start, and he had the magus to drag him along.

Nahuseresh tells me I am not king. Well see if he really prefers the Thief.

Damn him, damn him, damn him.

if you tease a dog, it bites.

Finally I went and found my hat and skewered it on my head with a four-inch hat pin. I wore the hat because I knew my mother never visited without one. The pin I thought would be a comfort in case of emergency.

Teleus, who had faced his failures and his death and the death of his friend and accepted his own salvation at the hand of a man he despised, ran out of the strength to accept any more. He contradicted the king.

A successful thief doesn't depend on things being unlikely to happen, I said.

My god is not a ten-devotee-to-the-average-dozen, got-a-priest-on-every-corner kind of god who is always being badgered by his worshipers. He keeps a very close eye on me, and what may look completely stupid to you is merely a demonstration of my faith.

If an author's account of any man is tidy, you must believe it has been made so in contrast with the truth, which is rarely clear and never simple.

I had a]...Second bowl of oatmeal. It was a little bit gloppy.

I have seen too many men willing to fight to the death over a spilled cup of wine to think dying for a cause makes that cause just.

Do not offend one power to attain the favor of another.

If I was going to climb onto an animal eight times my size, I wanted to plan the attempt first.

I woke to find I had not been murdered in my sleep.

The Attolian waited, far and away the best non-speaker I think I have ever known.

That won't be necessary," said the magus coolly. "No one would mistake you for anything but a tool, Gen. If a sword is well made, does the credit go to the blacksmith or to his hammer? How much smarter than a hammer can you be if you flaunt the proof of your crimes in a wineshop?" I flushed, and he laughed. If I hadn't already been angry, it might not have seemed unkind laughter.

He reached for a tabletop and ran his hands over it, clutching the edge until his knuckles turned white. He wanted to know that it was solid. Eddis knew that all the world would seem to him insubstantial, as if it might tear away and reveal something else infinitely larger and more terrifying.

A liar thinks everyone else lies? ... A thief thinks everyone else is stealing from him? ... A philanderer thinks everyone else is philandering.

He thought that when he had healed sufficiently, and withdrawn from the capital, he might write the magus a letter and open a correspondence on Euclid, or Thales, or the new idea from the north, that the sun and not the Earth might be the centre of the universe.