And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no...

If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine.

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.

If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so.

Well, look, I was angry. I don’t think I commit a lot of gratuitous violence, but this was war, and he was a jerk, and I made a mess of him. I threw him through...

You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

By the standards of magical society they’d fallen at the first hurdle: they hadn’t had the basic good sense to keep their shit to themselves.

In a way fighting was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make...

The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they’d...

If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart — reality is tough, unyielding stuff,...

He wanted to stick his finger in it and see what happened. Some story, some quest, started here, and he wanted to go on it. It felt fresh and clean and unsafe, nothing like the...

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.

The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

Now that he was teaching Quentin could see why the faculty didn’t bother trying to improve the climate. It kept people amazingly focused. … You could actually watch as the determination to seize the moment...

You’re all so obsessed with other worlds, you’re so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you’ve never bothered to figure out what’s going on here!