I'll not deny I am impressed by your mastery of six warrens, Quick Ben. In retrospect, you should have held back on at least half of what you command." The man made to rise. "But, Bauchelain," the wizard replied, "I did.

Believe it or not, friendships are difficult to write in fiction. They can easily come across as forced, particularly if they involve too much explication and too many overt gestures of affection.

It is an extraordinary act of courage,' said Tulas Shorn, 'to come to know a stranger's pain.

It is one thing to lead by example with half a dozen soldiers at your back. It is wholly another with ten thousand.

"There's little value in seeking to find reasons for why people do what they do, or feel the way they feel. Hatred is a most pernicious thing, finding root in any kind of soil. It feeds on itself." "With words."

Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.

I hear Seven Cities natives grow fruit just so they can eat the larvae in them.