Crystal Gorge

The stars were better company anyway. They were very beautiful, and they almost never snored.

Why do some trees stay green while others change their color?” “Certain trees need to show off, dear. I’m sure that my big brother could explain why it happens. Dahlaine loves to explain things, and he can be very tedious about it. I prefer simpler answers. The trees are sad because summer’s almost over.

Do you ever plan to grow up, Veltan?” he asked. “Not if I can avoid it, no.

Don’t throw good ideas away until you’ve considered all of your options.

As long as people are talking instead of fighting, nobody loses very much blood—unless he happens to bite his tongue.

It’s different," Sorgan’s younger cousin Torl declared, gesturing at the glorious sunset late that afternoon. "It’s pretty enough, I suppose, but it’s not too much like the sunsets out at sea. Mountains seem to do peculiar things to the sky." "It’s the clouds, Captain Torl," Keselo explained. "Most of the time, I’d imagine, the clouds out over the sea sort of plod along from here to there. When they come to mountains, though, they have to climb up one side and then slide down the other. That sort of scrambles them, so they’re thicker in some places and thinner in others. That’s why we see so many different shades of red in a mountain sunset.

It keeps him happy, Dahlaine, and happy people are nicer than gloomy ones. Haven't you noticed that before?

Sorgan tried his very best not to think about how long it must have taken for a stream that small to eat its way down through solid rock to form its current bed. Sorgan knew exactly what the word “hundred” meant, but when numbers wandered off toward “thousand”—or even “million”—and the people who used those terms were talking about years, Sorgan’s mind shied back in horror.

I thought the trees down in Lady Zelana’s country were about as big as a tree could get,” he said, “but the ones around here are so tall that they probably tickle the moon’s tummy when she goes by.

He can come up with the most exotic things I’ve ever seen or heard of every time he blinks his eyes.

Life’s much more pleasing when you don’t have to spend all of your time thinking.

La luna si levò sopra la prateria e sembrava succhiare via tutti i colori dal paesaggio circostante; adesso tutto appariva diverso. I cespugli lungo il letto asciutto non erano verdi ma neri e avevano un che di minaccioso.