You can't succeed unless you're willing to risk failure

Don't assume the world evolved in the order in which you discovered it.

You can only have one first born child. You may love all your children deeply and with passion, but there is something unique about the first born.

A hero is someone who simply got too frightened to use his good sense and run away, then somehow lived through it all.

Old habits are hard to forget, and old fears are habits.

The world is much larger than I once dreamed, or perhaps my place in it is smaller than I once realized.

My dear dead mother wanted me to go into an honorable trade, like grave robbing. Would I listen? No. Be an assassin, like your uncle Gustav, she said. Would I pay heed? No. Apprentice to the Necromancer―