“With maaaaaaaaaagic!”

“Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all.”

“Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.”

“He wanted to stick his finger in it and see what happened. Some story, some quest, started here, and he wanted to go on it. It felt fresh and clean and unsafe, nothing like the heavy warm lard of palace life. The protective plastic wrap had been peeled off”

“Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.”

“Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.”

“You’re all so obsessed with other worlds, you’re so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you’ve never bothered to figure out what’s going on here!”