“Who is it who decides that one man should live and another should die? My life wasn't worth any more than his, but he's the one who's buried, while I get to enjoy at least a few more hours above the ground. Is it chance, random and cruel, or is there some purpose or pattern to all this, even if it lies beyond our ken?”

“No hunter of the sky should end his days as prey. Better to die on the wing than pinned to the ground.”

“A true warrior,” she said, “does not fight because he wishes to but because he has to. A man who yearns for war, a man who enjoys his killing, he is a brute and a monster. No matter how much glory he wins on the battlefield, that cannot erase the fact that he is no better than a rabid wolf who will turn on his friends and family as soon as his foes.”

“How terrible," said Eragon, "to die alone, separate even from the one who is closest to you."Everyone dies alone, Eragon. Whether you are a king on a battlefield or a lowly peasant lying in bed among your family, no one can accompany you into the void.”

“I need no master to punish me in order to behave as I ought. If I did, I would be no more than a child who obeys his father's rules only because he fears the whip, and not because he actually means good.”

“Death, he had come to believe, was a corrosive thing, and the more he was around it , the more it gnawed away at who he was.”

“A man rarely knows the day and hour when he will die. I could be killed any moment and there's not a blasted thing I can do about it.”