Roses! I swear you men have all your romance from the same worn book. Flowers are a good thing, a sweet thing to give a lady. But it is always roses, always red, and always perfect hothouse blooms when they can come by them.

Humor is important. If you're going to tell any sort of realistic story, you're going to have to have humor in it, because people are funny. Clever people especially.

This is the nature of love." Vashet said. "To attempt to describe it will drive a woman mad. This is what keeps poets scribbling endlessly away. If one could pin it to paper all complete, the others would lay down their pens. But it cannot be done.

Practice makes the master.

Do not mistake me for my mask. You see light dappling on the water and forget the deep, cold dark beneath.

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.

Elodin looked at me. "What a remarkably honest threat," he said. "Normally they're much more growlish and gristly than that." "Gristly?" I asked, emphasizing the 't.' "Don't you mean grisly?" "Both," he said. "Usually there's a lot of, 'I'll break your knees. I'll break your neck.'" He shrugged. "Makes me think of gristle, like when you're boning a chicken.