"If I am the pawn of the gods, it is because they know me so well, not because they make my mind up for me."
— Megan Whalen Turner (The Queen of Attolia)

""No 'Glory shall be your reward' for me. Oh, no, for me, it is, 'Stop whining' and 'Go to bed.'" "
— Megan Whalen Turner (The King of Attolia)

"Relius looked away. "He said that you...cried," he said softly.
"But not that he cried as well," said the queen, amused at the memory. "We were very lachrymose. ...Would you like to hear more romance of the evening? He told me the Guard should be reduced by half, and I threw an ink jar at his head."
"Is that when he cried?"
"He ducked," said Attolia dryly...
"I had not pictured you for a fishwife."
"Lo, the transforming power of love.""
— Megan Whalen Turner (The King of Attolia)

"Your Majesty, please get down. My friend Aris is really a very good man, and if you fall off that wall he's going to hang for it, and so will his squad, most of whom are also nice men, and though I can't say I really care if your attendants hang, there are probably many people that do care, and would you please, please get down?"

The king looked at him, eyes narrowed. "I don't think I've ever heard you say that many words in a row. You sounded almost articulate."
— Megan Whalen Turner (The King of Attolia)

"'I'll be your minister--'
"Of the exchequer? You'd rob me blind."
"I would never steal from you," he'd said hotly.
"Oh? Where is my tourmaline necklace? Where are my missing earrings?"
"That necklace was hideous. It was the only way to keep you from wearing it."
"My earrings?"
"What earrings?""
— Megan Whalen Turner (The Queen of Attolia)

"A man might fall at any time, and eventually the day must come when
God will let him. Whether I am on a rafter three stories up or on a
staircase three steps up, I am in my God's hands. He will keep me
safe, or He will not, here or on the stairs.
--Eugenides"
— Megan Whalen Turner (The King of Attolia)

"I yield to nobody in my admiration for God, but he's no good in bed."
— Ariana Franklin (The Serpent's Tale)

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"How absurd it was that in all seven kingdoms, the weakest and most vulnerable of people--girls, women--went unarmed and were taught nothing of fighting, while the strong were trained to the highest reaches of their skill."
— Kristin Cashore (Graceling)

"She knew her nature. She would recognize it if she came face-to-face with it. It would be a blue-eyed green-eyed monster, wolflike and snarling. A vicious beast that struck out at friends in uncontrolable anger, a killer that offered itself as a vessel of the king's fury.
But then it was a strange monster, for beneath its exterior it was frightened and sickend by its own violence. It chastised itself for its sacagery. And sometimes it had no heart for violence and rebelled against it utterly.
A monster that refused, sometimes, to behave like a monster. When a monster stopped behaving like a monster , did it stop being a monster? Did it become something else?
Perhaps she wouldn't recognize her own nature after all."
— Kristin Cashore