Ashling

Impatience is not the least of your faults, Malik, it is a kind of greed and someday it may see you undone.

It would be a simple matter if lives were lived by hindsight,’ Rushton said. ‘There is much we would not begin, if we could see how it would end.

You cannot defeat the sea - it is too great and too uncaring. You can only surrender to its power...All things that exist live, though maybe they do not measure life as we do. [Chapter 35, page 305]

I was suddenly stricken with a feeling of black despair, hopelessly muddled by what was right and wrong. Nothing seemed clear cut; we did evil in the name of good, and good was done in the name of evil. [Chapter 27, page 306]

Fools blow air out of their mouths as often as their bums, and either way it causes a stink and comes to nothing.

I have learned that happiness is like the sun. It must be enjoyed when it comes and while it shines.

Had not the jutting bones of the world survived a thousand aeons of human life? Could anything I or any human do really matter in the face of that? [Chapter 35, page 510]

It would be a little late in deciding now that we would not live our lives by the whimsical wisdoms of futuretellers, don't you think? [Chapter 33, page 386]

If I have learned one thing in the time I have spent here, is that sooner or later everything is linked to everything else. [ Chapter 19, p210]

Sometimes it is hard to know what the truth is. And sometimes truth is pain. Easier to hide the truth and make a secret of it, than to face it. -Chapter 22, page 254

I would never exhange safety for freedom, regardless or the danger. I had the right to risk my life as I chose. -Chapter 21, page 247

I shivered at the notion of a Misfit with empathy or coercion, driven by defective will. Thank Lud, Ariel had never realised his abiities or used them consciously. How much more harm might he have done? Chapter 9, page 97

And, for a moment, doubt flickered in me, but then I banished it, for surely nothing required courage so much as love, and I was equal to it.

I thought of the transcendent beauty of the first panel, and tried to understand how the ability to create such wondrous beauty could have become so perverted, so destructive. With power, my mind whispered.

It struck me suddenly that rather than spending my time worrying about my destined quest, I should simply live and trust in the fates to bring me where I was needed.