“Having to haul around extra poundage was far too much effort, so he saw to it that he never put it on and he kept himself in trim because doing things with decent muscles was far less effort than trying to achieve things with bags of flab.”

“Mithorden: 'He was brilliant, yes, but ready to laugh at himself when he made mistakes. You may not believe it, but he made mistakes often.'Luthiel: 'Why?' She choked around her tears.Mithorden: 'Because he tried to do great things. Anyone can succeed at easy things. But the things Valkire tried were very difficult. He wanted to make things better for people of all races -- for he saw the good in them.”

“When you put so much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.”

“There are certain things in a man's past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends. Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret. But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind. I can put it even this way: the more decent a man is, the larger will the number of such things be.”

“Some people have inspired whole countries to great deeds because of the power of their vision. And so could he. Not because he dreams about marching hordes, or world domination, or an empire of a thousand years. Just because he thinks that everyone’s really decent underneath and would get along just fine if only they made the effort, and he believes that so strongly it burns like a flame which is bigger than he is. He’s got a dream and we’re all part of it, so that it shapes the world around him. And the weird thing is that no one wants to disappoint him. It’d be like kicking the biggest puppy in the universe. It’s a kind of magic.”

“A hero isn’t defined by winning. Loads of heroes die in the effort. Most of them never get any recognition. No, a hero is just somebody who does the right thing when it would be far, far easier to do nothing.”