“We must be what we are, or we become our enemies. ”
“For all his frustrations and his chronic sense of being overburdened. He was proud of that; he’d always felt that it was worth doing a task properly if it was worth doing at all. That was part of his problem, of course; that was why he ended up with so much to do. It was also the source of his own particular pride: he knew--and he was certain they knew that there was no one else who could handle details such as these as well as he.”
“Even the birds above the lake
Are singing of my love,
And even the flowers along the shore
Are growing for her sake.
All the vines are ripening
And the trees come into bud,
For my love's footsteps passing by
Are summoning the spring.
Rian's stars in the night
Shine more brightly over her,
The god's moon and the goddess's
Guard her with their light.
Even the birds above the lake
Are singing of my love,
And even the flowers along the shore
Are growing for her sake”
“Rudel Correze is far from the first to seek to aid me in my passage to Rian. But I find myself still among the living, and I have discovered that I value this world for itself, not merely as a matter for someone's song. I love it for its heady wines and its battles, for the beauty of its women and their generosity and their pride, for the companionship of brave men and clever ones, the promise of spring in the depths of winter and the even surer promise that Rian and Corannos are waiting for us, whatever we may do. And I find now, your highness, long past the fires of my heart's youth and yours, that there is one thing I love more, even more than the music that remains my release from pain.'
'Love, de Talair? This is a word I did not expect to hear from you. I was told you foreswore it more than twenty years ago. The whole world was speaking of that. This much I am certain I remember. My information, so far distant in our cold north, seems to have been wrong in yet another matter. What is the one thing, then, my lord duke? What is it you still love?'
'Arbonne.”
“He was still on his feet, and before him was a man who stood in the path of...what? Of a great many things, his own dream of Gorhaut not least of all. Of what his home should be, in the eyes of the world, in the sight of Corannos, in his own soul. He had said this two nights ago, words very like this, King Daufridi of Valensa. He's been asked if he loved his country.
He did. He loved it with a heart that ached like an old man's fingers in rain, hurting for the Gorhaut of his own vision, a land worthy of the god who had chosen it, and of the honour of men. Not a place of scheming wiles, of a degraded, sensuously corrupt king, of people dispossessed of their lands by a cowardly treaty, or of ugly designs under the false, perverted aegis of Corannos for nothing less than annihilation here south of the mountains.”
“A lot of people don't believe in curses.
A lot of people don't believe in yellow-spotted lizards either, but if one bites you, it doesn't make a difference whether you believe in it or not.”
“You know what I wish? I wish all the scum of the Earth had one throat and I had my hands about it.”
“Lost are we, and are only so far punished,
That without hope we live on in desire.”
“He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.”
“There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a little boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.”
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