“Do you just want to get by? Or do you want to make me proud?”

“If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.”

“So Stapes conducted a dinner for just the two of us, then informed me of a dozen small but important mistakes I had made. Setting down a dirty utensil was considered crude, for example. That meant it was perfectly acceptable to lick one's knife clean. In fact, if you didn't want to dirty your napkin it was the only seemly thing to do.”

“She taught me I should never do anything in private I did not want talked about in public, and cautioned me not to talk in my sleep.”

“You do not know the first note of the music that moves me.”

“Auri," I asked slowly, "are you joking with me?"She looked up and grinned. "Yes I am," she said proudly. "Isn't it wonderful?”

“Ah,' the innkeeper said. 'So you were getting ready to drink then?''Tiny Gods, yes,' Bast said. 'To great excess. What the hell else is there to do?”