The pursuit of your power takes all that you have, if you will be great – it leaves neither time, nor energy, for anything else. We are born with the seeds of power in us and driven to be what we are by a hunger that knows no slaking.

The key to magic is magic, Caerdinn had said. To be a mage, you must be a mage. There is no time for anything else, if you will come to the fullness of your power.

I sometimes believe that the ability to survive on the memory of joy – or to transmit it – is the quality that most clearly separates the human from the beast.

She had killed literally hundreds of men, usually for business reasons, but had never learned to deal with them in a one-sided amatory situation.

Hidden within the heart of the great rose of music, he could forget time and place, forget the sting of his cut lip and the white man who’d given it to him, who had the right by law to give it to him; forget the whole of this past half year. For as long as he could remember, music had been his refuge, when grief and pity and rage and incomprehension of the whole of the bleeding world overwhelmed him: It had been a retreat, like the gentle hypnotism of the Rosary.

But that was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I’ve ever learned about anything – that she is her own, and what she gives me is of her choosing, and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it – and its choice to be there – are gone.

It is a terrible mistake to put the rifles of tomorrow into the hands of the ignorance of yesterday.

To the pure, all things are pure,” Antryg remarked, in Magister Magus’ best soothsayer voice, “and to the unimaginative, all things are devilish.

She understood that even the worst days contained only twenty-four hours. One did what one had to do to get through them, and afterwards, one slept.

There is no temptation from outside the heart.