“You, there, girl! Halt!"
Who in the universe ever halts when the enemy tells them to?”
“A wager?" I repeated.
"Yes," he said, and gave me a slow smile, bright with challenge. ...
"Stake?" I asked cautiously. He was still smiling, an odd sort of smile, hard to define.
"A kiss." My first reaction was outrage, but then I remembered that I was on my way to Court, and that had to be the kind of thing they did at Court. And if I win I don't have to collect. I hesitated only a moment longer, lured by the thought of open sky, and speed, and winning.
"Done," I said.”
“Why is it the songs all end with the good people winning, but in life they don't?"
They don't make songs when the good lose," I muttered. "They make war chants against the bad. So there won't be any songs for us.”
“Except. What is normal at any given time? We change just as the seasons change, and each spring brings new growth. So nothing is ever quite the same.”
“Because you showed one face to all the rest of the world, and another to me.”
“It desolates me to disappoint you, but your brother is not here. Despite two really praiseworthy attempts at rescue."
... The hint of amusement irritated me, and sick and hurt as I was, I simply had to retort something. "Glad... at least... you're desolated.”
“One doesn't lose a self, like a pair of gloves or a pine. We learn and change, or we harden into stone.”
“If more people recognized the difference between friendship and mere attraction, and how love must partake of both to prosper, I expect there'd be more happy people.”
“I had seen ardency in men's eyes, but I had only felt it once. With Flauvic, false and therefore easy to dismiss. I suddenly wished that I could feel it now. No, I did feel it. I did have the same feeling, only I had masked it as restlessness, or as the exhortation to action, or as anger. I thought how wonderful it would be to see that spark now, in the right pair of eyes.”
“A horse blanket, Mel?
I remembered what I was wearing. 'It tore in half when Hrani tried washing it. She was going to mend it. This piece was too small for a horse, but it was just right for me.'
Bran laughed a little unsteadly. 'Mel. A horse blanket.”
“The more one has, the less one desires.”
“Some of it was wrong decisions made for the right reasons, and a little of it was right decisions made for the wrong reasons; but most of what I did was wrong decisions for the wrong reasons.”
“Who can ever know what turns the spark into flame? Vidanric's initial interest in me might well have been kindled by the fact that he saw my actions as courageous, but the subsequent discovery of passion, and the companionship of the mind that would sutain it, seemed as full of mystery as it was of felicity. As for me, I really believe that the spark had been there all along, but I had been too ignorant--and too afraid--to recognize it.”
“But I'd also learned that the self might want one thing, but that didn't mean it was right.”
“If your opponent is better armed and has longer reach, then surprise is your only ally. And then you'd better hope he's half asleep.”
“You don't look at the problem all at once, or it's like being caught in a spring flood under a downpour. You tackle the problem in pieces...”
“Who in the universe halts when the enemy tells them to?”
“But I will never ask anyone from our village-from any village in Tlanth-to risk his or her life unless I'm willing to myself.”
“the stubborn little countess—so unlike anyone Vidanric had ever met—trampled her determined, well-meaning way not only over his plans, but his thoughts.”
“I’d learned something, all right, about the power of attraction, and Nee was right, it was potent. But I’d also learned that the self might want one thing, but that didn’t mean it was right. Isn’t that why we have minds?”
“Suddenly I felt an overwhelming desire to be home. I wanted badly to clean out our castle, and replant Mama’s garden, and walk in the sunny glades, and think, and read, and learn. I no longer wanted to face the world in ignorance, wearing castoff clothing and old horse blankets.”
“Except, what is normal at any given time? We change just as the seasons change, and each spring brings new growth. So nothing is ever quite the same. I realize now that what I wanted was comfort, but that, too, does not often come with growth and change.”
“You're drunk as four skunks, you idiot.”
“I can see her struggling to make what she considers courtly banter, but if she’s ever been kissed before, I’ll eat my hat. I’ll eat your hat, which has more lace on it.”
“It is a shame that so few have the time or inclination for scholarship these days. There is much entertainment to be afforded in perusing the mistakes of our forbears.”
“If, forgetting the respect due to the Creator, I were to attempt a criticism of creation, I would say ‘Less matter, more form!”
“I would always be earthbound; he hadn’t robbed me of my ability to fly or to live forever. I appreciated nuns now, not the conscripted kind, but modern women who chose it. If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?”
“What we in the modern world need, then, is something like morality but one level up. We”
“Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better not just at meditating, but at a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness. People who meditate regularly aren’t just better at these things. Over time, their brains become finely tuned willpower machines. Regular meditators have more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, as well as regions of the brain that support self-awareness. It”
“I became skilled at covering my tracks, filling in the blanks. Sometimes the blanks were never filled. At other times, I would recall places where I had been or things I had done as if from a dream, which made the playback of my father and other men abusing me seem I even less real, fantasies conjured up from my imagination, not my memory. Perhaps somebody else’s memory. I didn’t think of myself as having mental-health problems. You don’t at sixteen. I thought of myself as being special, highly strung, moody.”
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