297 Quotes by Naomi Novik

I’m not stupid, nor a liar,” I said, “and if I can’t do any good, I can at least do something.

It comes, I suppose,” I said thoughtfully, speaking to the air, “of spending too much time alone indoors, and forgetting that living things don’t always stay where you put them.

I was back in comfortable plain skirts again, but they looked at me anyway as they went away, not with hostility, but not the way any of them would ever have looked at a woodcutter’s girl from Dvernik. It was the way I had looked at Prince Marek, at first. They looked at me and saw someone out of a story, who might ride by and be stared at, but didn’t belong in their lives at all.

He made her give him gold just to live, as if she belonged to him because he was strong enough to kill her. My father was strong enough to kill me but that did not mean I belonged to him.

Hush, sweetheart. You don’t have a mother anymore, but let me to speak to you with her voice a minute. Listen. Stepon told us what happened in your house. There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies. That it what was in your house with you, all your life. But here you are with your brothers, and you are not eaten up, and there is not a wolf inside you. You have fed each other, and you kept the wolf away. That is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away.

He would only shrug and look at me expectantly again, waiting for high magic: magic that came only when you made some larger version of yourself with words and promises, and then stepped inside and somehow grew to fill it.

I watched them roam awhile, and had a small weep, but even grief had its limits. By dinner-time I was horribly bored.

A servant is easy to make dishonest when they bring you coin and never touch any themselves,” he said. “Let her feel that her fortune rises with yours.

He’d also agreed to be betrothed to the Archduke of Varsha’s daughter, a girl of nine who had evidently impressed him a great deal by being able to spit across a garden plot. I was a little dubious about this as a foundation for marriage, but I suppose it wasn’t much worse than marrying her because her father might have stirred up rebellion, otherwise.