Barbara Hambly

“The music had ceased. Alex walked over to the gramophone, wound it up again, and put on more blues, a woman singing this time, gay and sad at once, like a stranded angel who had traded holiness for humanity but remembered what it used to be like to know God.”

“If I don't read page ninety, it won't have happened to them. Black Beauty will still live with all his friends at Birtwick Park … The knights will be able to go on having jolly adventures without Lancelot meeting Guinevere and bringing the whole Round Table crashing down into ruin on their heads… ”

“One shouldn't allow oneself to be intimidated by something that can be picked up and tucked under one's arm.”

“I simply don't shine in company. Mostly I prefer to retreat with a book.”

“The costumes help. They make it less real, disguise what it really is both for the actors and for the people who'll see it on the screen. It's like the people who read Anna Karenina, and because it's in Russia they can say, 'Oh, that's not my pain they're talking about.' And Chris is tough. She goes from one thing to the next and doesn't worry about the past. When a cat sits mere purring on your lap, you know for a fact she isn't thinking about her former owner; she's thinking about her dinner. That's Chris.”

“Then someone within closed the door, shutting Norah out into the howling dust of the night. The clouds parted briefly to reveal the full moon's cold eye, then closed again. Wind seared over the pavilion's double roof, its voice rising to a shriek. Distantly, among the maze of walls, came the frenzied barking of hundreds of tiny dogs. As she drifted towards wakefulness, Norah could not tell whether it was the wind that she heard just at the end, or whether, within the dark hall, the girl had begun to scream.”

“Dragonsbane, they called him.Slayer of dragons.Or a dragon, anyway. And, he'd later found out, not such a very big one at that.”

“The worst thing about knowing that Gary Fairchild had been dead for a month was seeing him every day at work.”

“If the other novice wizards on the row hadn't broken into Raeshaldis's rooms, pissed on her bed and written WHORE and THIEF on the walls, she probably would have been killed on the night of the full moon.”

“Lexington wasn't a great city, like Philadelphia or New York, but around the Courthouse square, and along Main Street and Broadway, brick buildings reared two and three stories tall, and it was possible to buy almost anything: breeze-soft silks from France that came upriver from New Orleans, fine wines and cigars, pearl necklaces, and canes with ivory handles shaped like parrots or dogs'-heads or (in the case of Mary's older friend Cash Clay) scantily dressed ladies (but Cash was careful not to carry that one in company).”

“As Cinderella would probably tell you, even a prince who only recognizes your footwear is preferable to a lifetime of cleaning grates.”

“Of course I’m frivolous,” [Antryg] replied mildly. “You yourself must know how boring gravity is to oneself and everyone else.”

“To the pure, all things are pure,” Antryg remarked, in Magister Magus’ best soothsayer voice, “and to the unimaginative, all things are devilish.”

“God has judged me all my life. But that is God's privilege, my lady. Not yours.”

“We love people differently at different stages of our knowledge of them. As love changes its hape and its nature, we have to decide what we're going to do about that love on any given day.”

“The universe, it appeared, had never been kind to Captain Bortrek, conspiring against him in a fashion that Threepio privately considered unlikely given the man's relative unimportance. Knowing what he did about the Alderaan social structure, shipping regulations, the psychology of law enforcement agents, and the statistical behavior patterns of human females, Threepio was much inclined to doubt that so many hundreds of people would spend that much time thinking up ways to thwart and injure a small-time free-trader who was, by his own assertion, only trying to make a living.”

“The question is always the answer, provided you want the answer badly enough.”