Quotes from Shannon Hale

Throwing herself into learning helped Miri ignore the painful chill of solitude around her.

This morning, Tegus welcomed me again with an arm clasp and cheek touch. I wasn't startled this time, and I breathed in at his neck. How can I describe the scent of his skin? He smells something like cinnamon-- brown and dry and sweet and warm. Ancestors, is it wrong for me to imagine laying my head on his chest and closing my eyes and breathing in his smell?

The to Cathal was battered and only one wagon wide, with swells of hard earth where mud had frozen during cold ad rainy seasons. Enna tripped often, and cursed each time she tripped, until Dasha said, "Enna, you might watch your language." Enna grimaced. "I was. You should hear my thoughts.

Razo was sorely tempted to assert that all was true and he'd lost his horns and tail in a tragic childhood accident

Oh, but I like my geese. Like cats, they can't be told what to do, and like dogs, they're loyal, and like people, they talk every chance they get.

She answered by standing and kissing him first and held his cheeks and closed her eyes and felt sure as bones and deep as blood that she had found her place.

Get back in my cot, girl," said Gilsa. "You're sickly." No, I'm not," said Ani. Oh, no? Well, maybe stubbornness is a sickness, did you ever think of that?

He nodded. "And if I don't make you feel like the most beautiful woman in the world every day of your life, then I don't deserve to be near you.

My ma says a rock lasts forever, but people don't, and that's what makes them more precious.

Go on, son, you're not doing me any good by bleeding.

She dismounted, grabbed Enna's hand so tightly that she drew blood with her fingernails, walked straight into the nearest cottage, and plopped down on a bed. Enna nodded to the startled cottage dwellers. It's the queen, you see," said Enna. "She's going to have a baby in your house. You don't mind?

You've been quiet lately...but it's not so much the quiet as something inside the quiet.

He'd followed Dasha once before and remembered which door was hers. He knocked, peered inside, then jumped in and shut the door, quiet as brushing two feathers together. He smiled at his own stealth, then swaggered right into a chair, banging it against the wall. You oaf. He cut short his swagger and begin to move with exaggerated sneakiness. There was a certain pleasure in that, too.

Does anyone smell roasting meat?' said Razo, 'Oh, wait, it's just Geric's face.

Ani felt a stirring, a hope, a winged thing waking up in her chest and brushing her heart with it's feathers.

How could you miss it? Just the sound of her voice makes my chest feel tight, my face gets hot and my mouth goes dry whenever she's near. It's getting so bad, all I have to do is see her and I'm already thinking, 'What does she want? What can I do for her?' She's got some power over me, there's no question, and what else could it be? ~Razo

The snow was too light to stay, the ground too warm to keep it. And the strange spring snow fell only in that golden moment of dawn, the turning of the page between night and day.

fantasy is not practice for what is real—fantasy is the opiate of women.

Enna leaned back her head and laughed at the sky. 'Of course he wasn't! Who could kill Razo?

She touched the healthy folds of skin around the baby's neck, wrists, and thighs, the dark lines crying for life made in his forehead, and thought how people start with wrinkles and end with wrinkles, grow into their skin and then live to grow out of it again.

Some people are born with the first word of a language resting on their tongue though it may take some time before they can taste it.

They weren't nice words he said. He could've lived a good life and died never having made a person feel rubbed down to bones and too sad to hold together.

Saying my story makes me want to change it, make it sound pretty the way I do with the stories I tell the workers. I'd like it to have a beginning as grand as a ball and an ending in a whisper, like a mother tucking in a child for sleep.

Years ago, before this estate was generously and unwillingly turned over to the crown, the lord here was a genuine dimwit. He had a minister stashed behind his throne to whisper clever things to say.