“No matter how much pressure you feel at work, if you could find ways to relax for at least five minutes every hour, you’d be more productive.”

“Would a minute have mattered? No, probably not, although his young son appeared to have a very accurate internal clock. Possibly even 2 minutes would be okay. Three minutes, even. You could go to five minutes, perhaps. But that was just it. If you could go for five minutes, then you'd go to ten, then half an hour, a couple of hours...and not see your son all evening. So that was that. Six o'clock, prompt. Every day. Read to young Sam. No excuses. He'd promised himself that. No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.”

“Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can't buy more hours. Scientists can't invent new minutes. And you can't save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you've wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.”

“You couldn’t love someone the way he had loved her and then be turned off them in five minutes by nothing more than lies and daydreams. Could you? Could you?”

“You can’t protect yourself. No matter how safe you think you are. No matter how much precaution you take, the rodents always find a way in.’ (Kiara)”

“Didn’t matter how much love you gave them. How good you treated them. How you gave them everything you wish to the gods you’d had, including respect. It didn’t matter how much you hated the life you’d been forced against your will to live or how hard you’d try to put the past behind you. They cursed you for surviving and judged you on a past you despised even more than they did. He and Nykyrian were the ones who’d lived in hell, and these assholes who had no understanding of the world dared to look down on them for it.”