Towers of Midnight (The Wheel of Time, #13)

by Robert Jordan

Nothing was more dangerous for the sanity of men than a woman with too much time on her hands.

Sometimes a good man can do wrong. At times, it is appropriate to punish him. At other times, punishment serves nobody, and the best thing to do is to let him continue and learn. As I continued and learned, after making such a poor judgment.”

“Back in Emond’s Field, there was a patch of fine, cultivated Emond’s Glory flowers near a brook. My father liked to walk there, and loved their beauty. But then when the new bridge was built, people began traipsing across the patch to get to it. “My father tried for years to keep them off the patch. Small fences, signs. Nothing worked. And then he thought to build a neat path of river stones through the patch, cultivating the flowers to the sides. After that, people stopped walking on them.

Small things were important. Seconds were small things, and if you heaped enough of those on top of one another, they became a man’s life.