[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.

When you’re feeding the second coachload of tourists that day you aren’t thinking about the birthday party for fifty next week.

She, too, spoke only when the queen or king addressed her first, but she looked searchingly at every supplicant, and her clear face said that she had opinions about everything she heard, and that it was her proud duty to think out those opinions, and make them responsible and coherent.

What we can do, we must do: we must use what we are given, and we must use it the best we can, however much or little help we have for the task. What you have been given is a hard thing–a very hard thing… But my darling, what if there were no one who...

I don’t put up with being messed around, and I don’t suffer fools gladly. The short version of that is that I’m a bitch. Trust me, I can provide character references.

And everybody dreams about vampires; we grow up dreaming about them. They’re the first and worst monster that lives under everybody’s bed.

It seems to me further, that it is very odd that fate should leave so careful a trail, and spend so little time preparing the one that must follow it.

Slowly, painfully, I let go. It was like prying my own fingers off the edge of the cliff. And that hurt too-particularly the falling part, and not being sure what was at the bottom.But I did know. Now was what was at the bottom. I was already there.

(There was an idea much beloved and written about by this country’s philosophers that magic had to do with negotiating the balance between earth and air and water; which is to say that things with legs or wings were out of balance with their earth element by walking around on feet or, worse, flying above...

What this world doesn’t have is the three-wishes, go-to-the-ball-and-meet-your-prince, happily-ever-after kind of magic. We have all the mangling and malevolent kinds. Who *invented* this system?

One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer… is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you’re going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then...

So, what do you do when you know you have two days to live? Eat an entire Bitter Chocolate Death cake all by myself. Reread my favorite novel. Buy eight dozen roses from the best florist in town–the super expensive ones, the ones that smell like roses rather than merely looking like them–and put them...

Oh, why does compassion weaken us?’It doesn’t, really … Somewhere where it all balances out – don’t the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live? – if we could go there, you could see it doesn’t. It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here,...

The big difference between my mom and me– besides the fact that she is dead normal and I’m a magic-handling freak– is that she’s the real thing. She may have a slight problem seeing other people’s points of view, but she’s honest about it. She’s a brass-bound bitch because she believes she knows best. I’m...

The Pavilion did not burn by lightening,” she said.He hesitated again. “It holds the memory of fire,” he said at last. “Lightening is young and strong and thoughtless, but it could also wish to visit the site of some particular victory of one of its kind–as a young soldier recently commissioned might visit the scene...

The sheep, I guess demented with love, didn’t object to this at all. Casimir somehow found time to pull up some grass for it, and it lay down and munched its grass and then chewed its cud like hanging out with dogs […] was something it always did. Maybe it thought other sheep were boring...

It was Ebon’s turn now, and he stepped forward and gave the pegasus’ great clarion neigh — far more like a trumpet than a horse’s neigh; hollow bones are wonderful for resonance — and swept his wings forward to touch, or almost touch, his alula-hands to her temples before he gave his own speech, in...

[Gonturan] is a true friend, but a friend with thoughts of her own, and the thoughts of others are dangerous.

Majid gave me a brief dazzling golden stare and then half-lidded his eyes again. I know when my life is being threatened.

The merrel also knew its wing had not healed. But I could reach a great height once more before it failed me, it said. And from there I would fold my wings and plummet to the earth as if a hare or a fawn had caught my eye; but it would be myself I stooped...

I’d always had a guilty preference for fiction. Since I seemed now to be living fiction, this proved to have been an entirely reasonable choice.

It wasn’t so long ago when all the so-called scientists said that humans were intelligent and that animals weren’t, humans were the solitary unchallenged masters of the globe and probably the universe and the only question was whether we were handling our mastery well. (No. Next question.)

It is halfway true that if you are involved in a family coffeehouse you don’t have a life.

She had not meant to name them, but she could not help herself; and having done so she thought, Let their names be symbols that their lives are worth the keeping. Let them struggle a little the harder, to keep their names.

It’s funny, because I had thought, living through those first two months after the night at the lake, that the great crisis was about What I Was or Who I’d Become or What Terrible Thing Was Wrong With Me (and About to Go Wronger) and Why All Was Changed As a Result. But I was...

…but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago “something or other or die” had always seemed like a plain choice in favor of the something or other.

The most serious drawback to the telling-nothing approach is that it made that much more of a mystery of what had happened, and the nature of gossip abhors a vacuum of the unexplained.

It doesn’t matter if I’m only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months’ supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham’s story “The Book-Bag.

The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?

Vampires do breathe, by the way, but their chests don’t move like humans’. Have you ever lain in the arms of your sweetheart and tried to match your breathing to his, or hers? You do it automatically. Your brain only gets involved if your body is having trouble. Fortunately there was nothing about this situation...

I wondered what you’d have on the side with a plate of Deep Fried Anxiety. Pickles? Coleslaw? Potato-strychnine mash?

I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.

Cats were often familiars to workers of magic because to anyone used to wrestling with self-willed, wayward, devious magic–which was what all magic was–it was rather soothing to have all the same qualities wrapped up in a small, furry, generally attractive bundle that…might, if it were in a good mood, sit on your knee and...

Feeling at peace, however fragilely, made it easy to slip into the visionary end of the dark-sight. The rose shadows said that they loved the sun, but that they also loved the dark, where their roots grew through the lightless mystery of the earth. The roses said: You do not have to choose.

She dreamed about knights in armour and glorious quests, and sometimes in these dreams she was a knight and sometimes she was a lovely lady who watched a particular knight and hoped that, when he won the tournament, it would be she to who he came, and stooped on bended knee, and…and sometimes she dreamed...

…there remained a strange formality between them, and her pleasure in his presence felt too much like missing him had felt during the last week.

I have a mastery of the art of worrying that is a burden to me if I may not use it. –Robin

Sometimes it is better not to know. Sometimes when you do know you just fold up.

I like that: a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself. Sounded like something out of a self-awareness class, probably with yoga. See what kind of a pretzel you can tie yourself into and press on the understood… I was raving, if only to myself.

One has various things in the back of one’s mind. Occasionally an opportunity presents itself to bring one forward. Most of these opportunities come to nothing. Once in a very great while one — or two — do come to something.

Even Mongo liked him, although Mongo likes everybody. (Also Mongo was so thrilled with himsel for staying in the dog bed till I’d released him that nothing was going to blow his mood.)

It’s kind of interesting you’re driving a car big enough for a wolfhound and a mastiff to get in the back of today,” I said.”And a greyhound, a dark brown bear, and a brindle utility vehicle,” said Jill.”Greyhounds don’t take up much room,” I said. “They’re like dog silhouettes.

We kings do develop a certain ability to recognize objects under our noses.

Can you trust me, he said. Not will you. Can you.Can I trust him?What do I have to lose?

Her betrothed is a lout, her father is a boor; and now her brother is trailing around looking like a thunderstorm about to burst. Men are not sensible creatures.”Thank you,’ said Robin.

You can be a really nasty, selfish little jerk when you’re scared enough. I was scared enough.

As I have said, you have no reason to trust me, and an excellent reason not to.

I’m also old… and my own gift for writing fantasy grows out of very literal-minded, pragmatic soil: the things I do when I’m not telling stories have always been pretty three-dimensional. I used to say that the only strong attraction reality ever had for me was horses and horseback riding, but I’ve also been cooking...

Everything was an adventure, at night, when you were where you shouldn’t be, even if it was somwhere you could go perfectly well in daylight, and it was then only ordinary.

When you write your first novel you don’t really know what you’re doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first ‘Once upon a time’. I’m not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner...