“We say that flowers return every spring, but that is a lie. It is true that the world is renewed. It is also true that that renewal comes at a price, for even if the flower grows from an ancient vine, the flowers of spring are themselves new to the world, untried and untested. The flower that wilted last year is gone. Petals once fallen are fallen forever. Flowers do not return in the spring, rather they are replaced. It is in this difference between returned and replaced that the price of renewal is paid. And as it is for spring flowers, so it is for us.”

“Waiting for a battle was the hardest part. Unless you got a dagger in your gut during the battle. Then that was hardest. Or you got through just fine and saw your men dead around you. Then that was.”

“It's the problem in seeing too much of the world. In loving too much of it. You can only live in one place at a time. And eventually, you pick your spot, and the memories of all the others just become ghosts.”

“ “So how’d you do it? How did you get to where you aren’t scared all the freaking time?”Erin’s smile drooped a little, tired with the effort. “You’re making an assumption,” she said. “Just hang in there. It’ll get easier.” “But not better,” Alexander said. “But not better.”

“Love is like recognition. It's the moment when you catch sight of someone and you think There is someone I have business with in this life. There is someone I was born to know.”

“She shone like the horizon when it is almost too bright to look upon.”

“I think the world is often like that.” “Like what?” “Comic, but only at the right distance.”

“I’m saying there is evil in the world,” Master Kit said, hefting the box on his hip, “and doubt is the weapon that guards against it.”

“It was only later, in her new, darker rooms above the banking house, that she realized it didn’t matter how loud she screamed or how violently she wept. Her parents would never come to her because, being dead, they didn’t care anymore.”

“Death, however clearly foretold, still came unexpectedly.”

“I choose not to believe in any gods as an act of charity,” Marcus said. “Charity toward whom?” “Toward the gods. Seems rude to think they couldn’t make a world better than this,”