297 Quotes by Naomi Novik

So the next morning, I had the deeply wretched experience of seeing Prince Marek stop outside the tower doors to look up to my window and blow me a cheerful and indiscreet kiss. I’d been watching only to be sure he actually left; it took nearly all the caution left in me not to throw something down at his head, and I don’t mean a token of my regard.

I’m glad,” I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy. It wasn’t that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn’t, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars. But they meant life: she was living, and I wasn’t.

I’ve got quite well-developed willpower when it comes to doing necessary work. I just have very little willpower when it comes to indulging petty resentment:.

As a novelist you have just unlimited budget, total creative control. You really get to have your cake – all the cake – and then you can have a second cake if you wanted to.

After a moment, he said, in almost marveling tones, ‘Are you deranged?

That man with my brother is an envoy.

I turned back and tried again, and once more I was sure that I was understanding, and all of it made perfect sense – better than perfect sense, even; it had the feeling of truth, of something that I’d always known and just hadn’t ever put into words, or of explaining clearly and plainly something I’d never understood.

I sat down and got out my current project, an extremely bad villanelle in which I was carefully avoiding the word pestilence, which was trying so hard to shove its way into every stanza that I was sure that if I actually wrote it down, the whole thing would turn into a tidy evocation of a new plague. I’m probably the only student who tries to prevent my writing assignments from turning into new spells.

I will never let Berkley commit treason, ever,” Maximus said, “but if he did, I would step on anyone who tried to hang him.