"... Can you pretend to be stupid?” Eliar made a rueful kind of face. “Ma’am,” he said, “I’m a country boy… — David Eddings

“Sick, isn’t it?” Dhakan replied. “Our glorious, but slightly warped, leader hasn’t let him out of her sight since the day he was captured.”

“Surely you don’t agree with that apostate!”

“I was talking about his skill, not his message, Aleikon ... He’s good. There’s no question about that.”

“I’m pretty good at that. There were a lot of things I did when I was just a boy that I didn’t tell her about. I didn’t come right out and lie to her, of course. A boy should never lie to his mother, but now and then things sort of slipped my mind. You know how that can happen.”

“Oh, yes.” Althalus laughed. “Things have been slipping my mind for as long as I can remember.”