“...it seems to me that sometimes-or perhaps I might venture most of the time-occurrences have no cause at all. New stars appear and old ones vanish. Short hats become popular again. Things are as they are and do as they please for absolutely no reason at all.”

“when all of life becomes crowded with profound and weighty matters, making time to engage in trivial things becomes an even greater priority.”

“...she could not think of what had happened to her that day, or of what might happen that night. Instead, she watched the lamplighters move along the avenues even as their celestial counterparts set the stars alight in the sky. The rain had washed the city clean, and the air was a confection of clematis and violets and peony. Music and light spilled out of so many grand houses that the two seemed at once ubiquitous and united, as if to play a note was to send forth a ray of illumination, and a quartet was enough to set the grandest halls aglitter.”

“I speak this way because I know how perilous speech can be.... A saber might be stopped by a shield. A bullet might be dodged by a stroke of luck. But you can't dodge a word. If one is flung at you it will hit its mark unerringly. No Garritt there's nothing in the world more dangerous than talk.”

“One is always willfully absurd.... If one does not say silly things with a purpose, then he is merely an idiot.”

“Ivoleyn is the most beautiful and remarkable woman in all of Altania, he said, his throat so tight the words inflicted a pain upon him, but he forged on all the same. I admire and love her to the fullest extent I am capable. I have ever since meeting her, though I was too stupid to understand at first what it was I felt. And once I did, I was too cowardly to make as stand for it.”

“Besides, Mrs. Quesnt, did it never occur to you that we are not changing at all-that rather, we are simply becoming more ourselves?”