How did you merit so much devotion so quickly?' I asked, making no attempt to keep the sarcasm from my voice.'I show them Heaven', said she, without a trace of irony. 'People are so desperate for light'.

I had felt the shot coming; I hadn’t realized the bow was loaded with this very quarrel, perfectly calibrated to hit him hardest. What part of me had been studying him, stockpiling knowledge as ammunition?

The beauty of the place moved me; I loved how the clean air felt in my lungs, how far I was from everything I had ever known. People I'd hurt, people I'd failed, people who thought me a monster. Here there was no monster greater than the ragged mountains.

I took a break, stretched, tried again, failed, kicked over the music stand (I am not proud of that), and wonder whether I had reached the limits of my musical ability. Maybe I'd never had any. Surely someone with a modicum of talent wouldn't have to work this hard.

This is my mind's garden, I tend it; I order it. I have nothing to fear.

He looked up at the reddening sky and said with a self-deprecating laugh, "You put me to shame, Seraphina. Your bravery always has.""It's not bravery; it's bullheaded bumbling."He shook his head, staring off into the middle distance. "I know courage when I see it, and when I lack it.

For the merest moment I couldn't breathe. Something inside me quivered, some oud string plucked by his words, and if I breathed it would stop.He did not know the truth of me, yet he had perceived something true about me that no one else had ever noticed. And in spite of that—or perhaps because of it—he believed me good, believed me worth taking seriously, and his belief, for one vertiginous moment, made me want to be better than I was.

Claude rubs the back of his neck and wrinkles his nose, about to tell me he was never sad. I believe this is called bravado and is not limited to lawyers, or even men, although that combination makes it almost unavoidable.

And I realized a wondrous truth: that knowledge could be our treasure, that there were things humankind knew that we did not, that our conquest need not comprise taking and killing, but could consist of our mutual conquest of ignorance and distrust.

I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.

I understood something about myself as well, even if I didn't have the will to examine it just then.

There are two sacred causes in this world,” he said, holding up his pinkie and ring ringer. “Chance and necessity. By chance I was there to help when you had need.

My companions ate the bear. I found I had no appetite.

Metaphor is awkward, but emotion, by its nature, leaves you no more scalable approach.

...emotions fly humans toward art

Let the one who seeks justice be just.

Here there was no monster greater than the ragged mountains.

My own survival required me to counterbalance interesting with invisible.

So if the Infernum is an empy interior, what's Heaven in their conception?" I asked, nudging him."A second inside-out house, inside, or rather 'outside' the first," he said. "If you cross its threshold, you realize our world, for all its wonder, has been but a shdow, another kind of empitness. Heaven is more than this.

Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that's like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can come to genuinely moral conclusions by our own paths.

He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.

I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and it turns out they don’t need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.

I was just chased through St. Willibald’s, and you know why? Because I was kind to a quig. I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and then it turns out they don’t need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.

I was drawn to his aloofness, the way cats gravitate toward people who’d rather avoid them.

Was it probably true that reasoning beings were equal? It seemed more like a belief than a fact, even if I agreed with it. If you followed logic all the way back to its origin, did you inevitably end up at point of illogic, an article of faith?

Someone should love you. I will bite him if he will not.

Sir James waved a gnarled hand. "They're nothing but feral file clerks, dragons. They used to alphabetize the coins in their hoards.

Orma moved a pile of books off a stool for me but seated himself directly on another stack. This habit of his never ceased to amuse me. Dragons no longer hoarded gold; Comonot's reforms had outlawed it. For Orma and his generation, knowledge was treasure. As dragons through the ages had done, he gathered it and then he sat on it.

Art is a conversation we are all invited to and are all worthy to participate in. Yes, great works can be intimidating, but no one else in the world has what you have—your voice, your eyes, your feeling and perspective. Other people have written great books, but no one else will ever write YOUR book. It's worth writing. That is the belief that carries me through.

An aged monk led me to the infirmary. "He's got the place to himself. Once the other invalids learned there was a dragon coming they miraculously got well! The lame could walk and the blind decided they didn't really need to see. He's a panacea.

Camba had bent her long neck down to Ingar's level and was muttering in his ear. "Do you feel the breeze on your face?" I heard her say. "That's yours, and worth feeling. Look at those orange clouds. All the trials of a day may be endured if you know there's such a sky at the end of it. Some days I told my heart to wait, just wait, because the sunset would teach me again that my pain was nothing compared with the eternal, circling sky.

I didn't want this dance to end, or Kiggs to let go of my hand. I didn't want him to turn his eyes away, or live any other moment than this one.

I smiled into the darkness. There was nothing "just" about metaphors, I was beginning to think; they followed me everywhere, illuminating and failing and illuminating again.

The Ninysh might have resisted a bit harder. I don't mean to imply that they were cowards...," Maurizio said shrugging, clearly implying that the Ninysh were cowards.