Was it probably true that reasoning beings were equal? It seemed more like a belief than a fact, even if I agreed with it. If you followed logic all the way back to its origin,...

If it can be known, I want to know it.

I was drawn to his aloofness, the way cats gravitate toward people who’d rather avoid them.

I took a break, stretched, tried again, failed, kicked over the music stand (I am not proud of that), and wonder whether I had reached the limits of my musical ability. Maybe I’d never had...

This is my mind’s garden, I tend it; I order it. I have nothing to fear.

He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon...

Art is a conversation we are all invited to and are all worthy to participate in. Yes, great works can be intimidating, but no one else in the world has what you have—your voice, your...

Why live in fear that he might find me disgusting someday, when I could make it happen right now?

So if the Infernum is an empy interior, what’s Heaven in their conception?” I asked, nudging him.”A second inside-out house, inside, or rather ‘outside’ the first,” he said. “If you cross its threshold, you realize...

Someone should love you. I will bite him if he will not.

Who will kiss you? Who will rock you to sleep?” His voice was slow, drowsy.”You never did,” I said, trying to tease him. “You were more father to me than my father, but you never...

My own survival required me to counterbalance interesting with invisible.

Sir James waved a gnarled hand. “They’re nothing but feral file clerks, dragons. They used to alphabetize the coins in their hoards.

And I realized a wondrous truth: that knowledge could be our treasure, that there were things humankind knew that we did not, that our conquest need not comprise taking and killing, but could consist of...

I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and it turns out they don’t need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.

Orma moved a pile of books off a stool for me but seated himself directly on another stack. This habit of his never ceased to amuse me. Dragons no longer hoarded gold; Comonot’s reforms had...

He looked up at the reddening sky and said with a self-deprecating laugh, “You put me to shame, Seraphina. Your bravery always has.””It’s not bravery; it’s bullheaded bumbling.”He shook his head, staring off into the...

Did I become court composer through masterful procrastination? Hardly!

An aged monk led me to the infirmary. “He’s got the place to himself. Once the other invalids learned there was a dragon coming they miraculously got well! The lame could walk and the blind...

He smiled sadly, then placed his hand around mine so we were holding the book together. “I believe that – with everything I have,” he said, holding my gaze. He kissed the edge of the...

I was feverish; I couldn’t keep down food. Orma stayed by me the entire time, and I suffered the illusion that behind his skin—behind everyone’s—was a hollow nothingness, an inky black void. He rolled up...

Claude rubs the back of his neck and wrinkles his nose, about to tell me he was never sad. I believe this is called bravado and is not limited to lawyers, or even men, although...

I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.

Chance and necessity. By chance I was there to help when you had need.

I was just chased through St. Willibald’s, and you know why? Because I was kind to a quig. I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and then it turns out they...

Metaphor is awkward, but emotion, by its nature, leaves you no more scalable approach.

Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that’s like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can...

I had felt the shot coming; I hadn’t realized the bow was loaded with this very quarrel, perfectly calibrated to hit him hardest. What part of me had been studying him, stockpiling knowledge as ammunition?

…emotions fly humans toward art