It's hard to be wrongfully accused, but it's worse when the people looking down on you are clods who have never read a book or traveled more than twenty miles from the place they were born.

I thought of all the others who had tried to tie her to the ground and failed. So I resisted showing her the songs and poems I had written, knowing that too much truth can ruin a thing. And if that meant she wasn't entirely mine, what of it? I would be the one she could always return to without fear of recrimination or question. So I did not try to win her and contented myself with playing a beautiful game. But there was always a part of me that hoped for more, and so there was a part of me that was always a fool.

I have, of course, been called many other things. Most of them uncouth, although very few were unearned

My thought is, if you're a book lover, you're going to enjoy winning a book even if it's not something you'd ordinarily pick up on your own. It's a chance to expand your horizons a little.

Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.

Auri took it, and peered inside the small leather sack. “Why this is lovely, Kvothe. What lives in the salt?” Trace minerals, I thought. Chromium, bassal, malium, iodine . . . everything your body needs but probably can’t get from apples and bread and whatever you manage to scrounge up when I can’t find you. “The dreams of fish,” I said. “And sailor’s songs.

All stories are true," Skarpi said. "But this one really happened, if that's what you mean.