Everything is a contest. All dealings among men are a contest in which some will succeed and others fail. And some are failing quite spectacularly.

You are inexperienced. So was I, once. So is every man. The measure of a person is not how much they have lived. . . It's in how they make us of what life has shown them.

What is belief - what is faith - if you don't continue it after failure?

Everyone gets scared, Princess. Even brave men sometimes run the first time they see battle. In armies, that's why there's so much training. The ones who hold aren't the courageous ones, they're the well-trained ones. We have instincts like any other animal.

Normally, I have a lot of alpha readers on my books. These are people that, once I finish a novel, I let them look at it and give me a reader response.

You've managed-- in our short three years together-- to kill not only my god, but my father, my brother, and my fiance. That's kind of like a homicidal hat trick. It's a strange foundation for a relationship, wouldn't you say?

Ruin still used Reen's voice-it was familiar, something that had always seemed a part of her. Discovering that it belonged to that thing...it was like finding out that her reflection really belonged to someone else, and that she'd never actually seen herself.