“It is a very beautiful day. The woman looks around and thinks: 'there cannot ever have been a spring more beautiful than this. I did not know until now that clouds could be like this. I did not know that the sky is the sea and that clouds are the souls of happy ships, sunk long ago. I did not know that the wind could be tender, like hands as they caress - what did I know - until now?”

“You know that saying about how you don’t know what you have until it’s gone? I already did know what I had, and now that she’s gone, I know even more.”

“He stepped on my shadow. I could not walk. And then I could not breathe. I did not know what had happened until it happened. It was like trying to stop the rain.”

“I have heard ballads of great battles, and poems about the beauty of a charge and the grace of a leader. But I did not know that war was nothing more than butchery, as savage and unskilled as sticking a pig in the throat and leaving it to bleed to make the meat tender. I did not know that the style and nobility of the jousting arena had nothing to do with this thrust and stab. Just like killing a screaming piglet for bacon after chasing it round the sty. And I did not know that war thrilled men so: they come home laughing like schoolboys after a prank; but they have blood on their hands and a smear of something on their cloaks and the smell of smoke in their hair and a terrible ugly excitement on their faces.I understand now why they break into convents, force women against their will, defy sanctuary to finish the killing chase. They arouse in themselves a wild vicious hunger more like animals than men. I did not know war was like this. I feel I have been a fool not to know, since I was raised in a kingdom at war and am the daughter of a man captured in battle, the widow of a night, the wife of a merciless solider. But I know now.”

“Did you know that you deserve much, much more than a guy like Javier?” I asked. “Did you know that even if I did know I deserve more than that, it still haunts me that I can’t at least have it?”

“Weed Rises to his feet. "Nature," he says softly, "makes so many beautiful things. But I did not know until you that nature could make a girl so beautiful.”