“This, I realized suddenly, was friendship. You didn't always agree, and you both might do things the other person wished you didn't, but it didn't mean things came to a grinding halt. It didn't mean you stopped being friends. You got over it, and you moved on.”

“I didn't think about being king,” he said, his voice hoarse.Eddis stared. “Your capacity to land yourself in a mess because you didn't think first, Eugenides, will never cease to amaze me. What do you mean you didn't think about being king? Is Attolia going to marry you and move into my library?”

“Always regret the things you did do, never the things you didn't.”

“Sometimes life just did things, he felt, and they didn't have to make sense. It helped when they did, and often the sense of a thing was just around a corner, but that didn't mean you ever got to see it.”

“If you didn't like it, why didn't you quit?"To do what? Wasn't anything I knew better than farming. I was cursed, that was the problem. Just because I didn't like it didn't mean I wasn't good at it... It's a curse all right, you're just too young to know about that sort of thing. To be good at something you don't care about?”

“Opening a present from a live person was scary enough. There was always the chance that the gift might be so wrong, so completely not the kind of thing you liked, that you'd realize they didn't really know you at all.”