The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1)

by Patrick Rothfuss

“Call a jack a jack. Call a spade a spade. But always call a whore a lady. Their lives are hard enough, and it never hurts to be polite.”

It’s hard to be wrongfully accused, but it’s worse when the people looking down on you are clods who have never read a book or traveled more than twenty miles from the place they were born.

It felt the same way your body feels after a day of splitting wood, or swimming, or sex. You feel exhausted, languorous, and almost Godlike.

But mostly because it felt like the right thing to do, and that is reason enough.

“How does it feel to know where you are going?”

“Rian, would you please cross your legs?” The request was made with such an earnest tone that not even a titter escaped the class. Looking puzzled, Rian crossed her legs. “Now that the gates of hell are closed,” Hemme said in his normal, rougher tones. “We can begin.”

Once, I sang colors to a blind man. Seven hours I played, but at the end he said he saw them, green and red and gold. That, I think, was easier than this.

When a man gives you a rose what you see may not be what he intends. You may think he sees you as delicate or frail. Perhaps you dislike a suitor who considers you all sweet and nothing else. Perhaps the stem is thorned, and you assume he thinks you likely to hurt a hand too quick to touch. But if he trims the thorns you might think he has no liking for a thing that can defend itself with sharpness. There’s so many ways a thing can be interpreted,”

“You think too much of me.” I smiled. “Perhaps you think too little of yourself.”

So we danced very carefully, unsure what music the other was listening to, unsure, perhaps, if the other was dancing at all.