Scott Lynch

Maybe this is going to complicate the hell out of things. So what? You’re the complication I want more than anything else. You’re my favorite complication.

Most of us find it starkly ludicrous that the height of all possible ambition, to the ungifted, must be to drape oneself in crowns and robes.

Next came the sort of kiss that banished the world to distant background noise and seemed to last a month.

You can’t help being young, but it’s past time that you stopped being stupid.

“Advice,” chuckled Doña Vorchenza. “The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one’s mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you’re a nag. Give it at seventy and you’re a sage.”

“I say again, impossible.”

“And I correct you again. Difficult. ‘Difficult’ and ‘impossible’ are cousins often mistaken for one another, with very little in common.”

By rights he was still outrunning his age, still ahead of most men nearing threescore years, but he knew deep in his heart that there would never be any way of running fast enough.

I have always found the presumptions of others to be the best possible disguise—haven’t you?

Time’s a river, Locke, and we’ve always drifted farther down it than we think.

“Here's to charming losers, I suppose.“

“If only we knew where to find some.“

I make it a point never to trust men with weapons to my windpipe.

In time, you’ll come to understand that a state like ours cannot afford to offer up a show of weakness for honesty’s sake; Duke Nicovante charges me with vouchsafing his security, not his conscience.