Chris Wooding

“The Ketty Jay was staffed with drunkards and drifters, all of them running from something -- whether it be memories or enemies or the drudgery of land-bound life -- but since Yortland they'd been running in the same direction. United by that common purpose, they'd begun to turn into something resembling a crew. And Frey had begun to turn into something resembling a captain.”

“Our heroes have arrived, then," the stranger said, his voice a soft, bubbly murmur."Excuse me?" Poison queries.The odd creature put down his rod in a little wooden cradle that rested next to him and got up from the edge of the jetty. He looked them over with his vast, yellowish eyes."Hmm," he said gloomily. "You don't seem a bad bunch." He jostled past them and began to shuffle back towards his house. "At least you're not the typical muscle-bound warrior, beautiful sorceress, and amusing thief sidekick. By the waters, did that become stale fast.”

“How was is that life never worked out the way it did in his head?”

“Not for the first time, he wished he commanded a highly trained bunch of soldiers instead of a ragtag mob of rejects in varying stages of alcoholism.”

“Imagination is as close as we will ever be to godhead . . . for in imagination, we can create wonders.”

“Well, wherever you go, whatever you do, you're still you. You can change your surroundings, start a new life, but you'll always fall into the same old patterns, make the same kind of friends, commit the same mistakes. The thing you need to change is yourself.”

“Things just seem so much better in theory than in practice.”

“If there was one thing worse than being cheated, it was being cheated by someone who referred to themselves in the third person.”

“On reflection,’ Crake said to Frey, as they huddled behind an upturned table, ‘this wasn’t one of your better plans.”

“They believe all connections are temporary, so to cling to them makes no sense. When someone is gone, they're gone. Live for now; the present is all there is. You can't know what will happen next, so why worry? Consequences are natural and.inevitable. just do what you feel you must.”

“She was spared the slow, steady droplets of blood that began to spatter the beds, drip, drip, drip, painting the white sheets in shocked flowers of red”

“Devil-boy Jack: "A higher power than ours directs us against the wych-kin. There is no turning back."Thaniel Fox: "There is no higher power, Devil-boy! And I am no-one's pawn, neither man nor wych nor whatever entity you speak of."Devil-boy Jack: "I do not speak of entities. I speak of the force that created the physics of the universe, the force that makes time flow forward and not allow everything to happen at once, the force that sets the patterns to which the planets turn. Its weapons are coincidence, unlikelihood, happenstance. It is there when a man stops suddenly to pick up a coin dropped by another man ten days before, and the woman who is to be his wife bumps into him, and five hundred years hence their offspring rules half the world. It is there when a chance comment causes a scientist to think, What if...? and ten years later a great plague is cured. It is so vast that what we call chaos is simply another part of its order, with a shape too big to see. It has no name, nor will it ever have, though man may hint darkly at fate and destiny. It is what it is... the pattern. We may choose our own paths, but the pattern is always ahead of us. It is a way. It is the way.”

“I just wanted them to die," said Poison. "They didn't have to make such a drama about it.”

“Once upon a time there was a young lady who lived in a marsh, and her name was Poison.”

“But time has a way of stealthily deciding a person’s mind without her conscious knowledge, and as she studied and procrastinated, Poison found one day that she had come to know her choice.”

“We may seem the weakest and most insignificant of all the Realms, but our strength comes in other ways. We have what no other race has: imagination. Any one of us, even the lowliest, can create worlds within ourselves; we can people them with the most extraordinary creatures, the most amazing inventions, the most incredible things. We can live in those worlds ourselves, if we choose; and in our own worlds, we can be as we want to be. Imagination is as close as we will ever be to godhead, Poison, for in imagination, we can create wonders.”

“You can’t tell half a tale, Poison. You can’t write half a book. Whatever you choose to do next will completely change the aspect of what has gone before. if you decided to suddenly kill your friends as they slept –“ Why would I do that?” Poison interjected.Bear with me,” Fleet said patiently. “If you did, then the tale would take on a whole new light. Instead of being the journey of Poison from Gull to save her sister, it would be the terrible story of how a young girl became a cold-blooded killer. They way it would be written would be different. Do you see? Or you might die right now, and it would turn out that it wasn’t your tale all along it was Bram’s or Peppercorn’s, and you were just one of the sideline characters. The whole story has to be known before it can be recorded; otherwise it might suddenly change. That’s the beauty, Poison. You never know what’s going to happen next. When the tale is ended, then the writing will be visible to your eyes; until then it is unwritten.”

“Then a person has only one tale?” No, some have two or three separate ones or more,” Fleet said. “Some people have many tales. Sometimes they are linked into one big tale, sometimes they are utterly distinct. Most people do not have one at all.”

“Cynicism was a one-way path, and once taken the way back was lost forever.”

“The books were legends and tales, stories from all over the Realm. These she had devoured voraciously – so voraciously, in fact, that she started to become fatigued by them. It was possible to have too much of a good thing, she reflected. “They’re all the same,” she complained to Fleet one night. “The soldier rescues the maiden and they fall in love. The fool outwits the wicked king. There are always three brothers or sisters, and it’s always the youngest who succeeds after the first two fail. Always be kind to beggars, for they always have a secret; never trust a unicorn. If you answer somebody’s riddle they always either kill themselves or have to do what you say. They’re all the same, and they’re all ridiculous! That isn’t what life is like!” Fleet had nodded sagely and puffed on his hookah. “Well, of course that’s not what life is like. Except the bit about unicorns – they’ll eat your guts as soon as look at you. those things in there” – he tapped the book she was carrying – “they’re simple stories. Real life is a story, too, only much more complicated. It’s still got a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everyone follows the same rules, you know. . . It’s just that there are more of them. Everyone has chapters and cliffhangers. Everyone has their journey to make. Some go far and wide and come back empty-handed; some don’t go anywhere and their journey makes them richest of all. Some tales have a moral and some don’t make any sense. Some will make you laugh, others make you cry. The world is a library, young Poison, and you’ll never get to read the same book twice.”

“Some of us are born in the right place, and some of us have to go look for it.”

“Don't confuse contentment with happiness...”

“Spit and blood!”

“Poison." he said, deadpan. "That's an unusual name to give your child. You must love her very much."She's a treasure." Bram agreed, blithely ignoing the sarcasm.....Then went a few dozen feet in silence, until they were out of eaarshor of the gaurd.She's a treasure." Poison mimicked, and Bram burst out laughing.”