I've always admired your rather formidable will, your refusal to back away from difficulties, but sometimes strength isn't about perseverance. Sometimes it's about knowing when to quit.

Because in a small dark room, a broken child lies on a filthy bed and stares up at a high window. He waits for me, too. And I—I who have failed at everything and have failed everyone—I must not, I cannot, I will not fail him.

Little by little, the old world crumbled, and not once did the king imagine that some of the pieces might fall on him.

She was his soulmate, as much a part of him as the very flesh and bone that made him. She was with him, in him, in everything he did. She was everything he wanted from his life, the very measure of his dreams.

The feeling that you get.... when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don't want it to, but you can't stop it. And you know, for the first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again quite be the same person you were.

Writers are damned liars. Every single one of them.

The more obscure our tastes, the greater the proof of our genius.