297 Quotes by Naomi Novik

If I ever did go maleficer, if I ever did start pulling malia out of people like toffee and tossing off those killing spells of mine left and right, I’d be unstoppable. Maybe literally. Raining death and destruction on all the enclaves of the world like a maw-mouth myself, like the biggest maw-mouth ever, tearing the others apart because they were my competition.

I started to murmur my own spell, but I found myself thinking not of roses but of water, and thirsty ground; building underneath his magic instead of trying to overlay it.

Her beautiful face was blank as an unwritten book.

Fire wouldn't burn he; blade wouldn't cut her, no matter how long we hacked away.

The Dragon's tower is a long way in the other direction, a piece of chalk stuck in the base of the western mountains.

And if you have been lying about it," Iskierka put in, having roused enough from her napping to follow the conversation, with slitted eyes, "you may be quite sure you will all be sorry: if anything has happened to my egg, I will burn everything between here and whatever house Napoleon is hiding in, and then I will set *that* on fire, too.

Araminta had generally considered the laws of etiquette as the rules of the chase, and divided them into categories: those which everyone broke, all the time; those which one could not break without being frowned at; and those which caused one to be quietly and permanently left out of every future invitation to the field.

I thought I could smell the sorcery in him, a sharp pungent mix of cinnamon and pepper and resin of pine, and deep below it burning woodsmoke.

They all had stories. They had mothers or fathers, sisters or lovers. They weren't alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves. It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse. I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them-- this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasn't a whole man.