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She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child of twelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven. The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.

EVERYTHING'S a story. You are a story—I am a story.

"I will beg your pardon for laughing, if it was rude," she [Sara Crewe] said then; "but I won't beg your pardon for thinking."

He had a brief but vivid memory of being seven years old at his grandmother’s vineyard in Nortcoor, looking into the night sky and seeing it for the first time as infinity towering above him like God, only worse because it was real.

Nothing humans can touch goes unmodified.

Stress, power, love. They didn’t change people, but they revealed people as who they were.

“We never had a chance,” he said. “Look at all this. We never stood a chance against this.”

“We did not,” Else agreed. “Too bad we didn’t know.”

“Knowing wouldn’t have mattered.”…

“We’d have fought anyway,” he said, thinking of Ostencour and his improvised knife. Synnia wrestling down the guard. “It’s what we do.”

“I don’t know if that idea is stupid or noble,” Else said.

“Human,” Dafyd said. “It’s just human. We don’t stop just because there’s no hope.”

Else nodded, stopped with her brow furrowed. A tear dropped from her eye unnoticed, and she shrugged. “There's always hope for something. Just not always…not always what we want.”

What is lost is lost, and why regret a dream I had when I was young just because the universe woke me from it?

Small moments, unnoticed at the time, change the fate of empires.

He hadn’t thought about it. It was a crisis, and in a crisis you did what needed doing. Stopping to think was a short path to panic. He didn’t have time for that.

My dad used to say that anyone who believes in a fair fight has never been in a fight.