“People will live their lives with or without a king to command them. It is the king who cannot live without his people.”

“A throne is always paid for in blood.The king of En had told her that once. Even should a king's ascension be bloodless as a gift from Heaven, to hold onto one's throne invariably meant that blood must flow -- as it had at the beginning, in the fight against the false king's armies, and the quelling of civil war, and the execution of criminals.Luckily, the fighting part was easy for Yoko. All she had to do was resist the temptation to run away.”

“Taiki was watching the kings talk, feeling the kind of happiness that can only come after a long sorrow.”

“Palaces are built on the people's bones. To tell the truth, the masses would be better off without kingdoms, which is why it takes a gifted ruler to tell just the right lies so they never realize it.”

“I think that once you're born, the thing you have to do is find out who you are and live that life as well as you can. You can't spend your time wondering how things would have been if you were someone different.”

“When people felt pain time and time again, they came to fear that pain above all other things. So they tried to ignore it, to forget it was happening, as a way of bearing it. And pretty soon, they would come to feel like they'd accomplished something just by doing that -- even though nothing had changed.”

“And that's when I realized that there's really two ways people cry. You cry when you're sorry for yourself, and then you cry when you are really sad. The tears you cry for yourself? Those are kid tears. You're crying because you want somebody to help you or pick you up. Your mom, your dad, the old lady next door... anyone.”