“I'm perfectly normal; its the rest of the world that's abstract.”

“Now, I pray you, cast yourself into a different world, a different trail of thought; step into a place where dragons live and breathe, where they are as real in touch and voice as you or I. Where they face the same extinction every day that they have suffered in our world: the extinction of myth . . . yet where they battle every moment to fend off such a fate for another day . . .”

“Prayer is the force as real as terrestrial gravity. As a physician, I have seen men, after all other therapy had failed, lifted out of disease and melancholy by the serene effort of prayer. Only in prayer do we achieve that complete and harmonious assembly of body, mind and spirit which gives the frail human reed its unshakable strength.”

“For this, for you, my heart will burnIt whispers to me, what I speak now in turn:If the sun should hide, let it hide;If darkness drain the light, on moonbeams we ride.It matters not,For I am by your side.If the sky should fall, let it fall;If Death open his wings, ignore his dark call;Let the stars fade, let worlds collide;Let the seas boil, let chaos hold back the tide.It matters not,For you are by my side.”

“From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned almost into a savage.”

“I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.”

“It's just like any relationship," Raelin told him with a grin, while Aldri practiced over and over again. "You need to coax her, persuade her, impress her, not knock her over the head with a mallet. Sometimes, for complicated things, you even need to grovel a little—but I'll teach you that later, some of the syllables in Faerilíca can take weeks to learn correctly. For now, keep trying to catch her eye in silence.""But magic is only converted energy and emotion," Aldri reminded him. "I already possess it, I only need to use it.""And just how do you want to take ten minutes' running energy or your liking for the color blue, and throw it out in front of you as an arrow-stopping shield, hm?”