The Blacktongue Thief (Blacktongue, #1)

by Christopher Buehlman

Luck is very real, and anyone who tells you differently wants all the credit for their own success.

the rich hold grudges the poor can’t afford,

“Mermaids don’t have squinnies. T’s’what makes ’em a parable for life. Warm and welcoming for the first half, then it gets cold and hard and smells bad.

And there’s humanity in a glimpse—we’ve always got a copper for a stone idol, but none for the beggar in its shadow.

What a fabulous kingdom the mind is, and you the emperor of all of it. You can bed the duke’s wife and have the duke strangled in your mind. A crippled man can think himself a dancer, and an idiot can fool himself wise. The day a magicker peeks into the thoughts of commoners for some thin-skinned duke or king will be a bad day. Those with callused hands will rise on that day, for a man will only toil in a mine so long as he can dream of sunny fields, and he’ll only kneel for a tyrant if he can secretly cut that tyrant’s throat in the close theater of his bowed head.

he had but thirty years behind him, and thirty more might have been purchased for the price of crossing the street.

I was so scared, I half wanted to piss myself, but the difference between the strong and the weak isn’t that the strong don’t piss themselves. It’s that they hitch their pissy pants up after and go through with it.