The Golden Enclaves (The Scholomance #3)

by Naomi Novik

All of magic essentially involves sneaking something you want past reality while it’s distracted and looking the other way.

If you’ve ever imagined lying down on a cloud and having it hold you up, that’s more or less what it was like. It didn’t make any sense and you knew better, but at the same time, you also secretly really believed that it would work, and were delighted to go along with it when improbably it did.

We’re all greedy, but children make it easier to be. We feel it’s only right to give them everything we can grab, even when you know that anything you feed your own child still comes out of someone else’s mouth.”

I imagine it’s always easier to do something monstrous if you can convince yourself you aren’t going to, up to the last minute, until you do.

I had the strong sense of living in the hushed moment just before an old rotten tree falls in the forest, inside the held breath, waiting.

in the same way you know perfectly well you ought to stop reading and go to bed and you’ll feel hideously groggy in the morning if you don’t, and yet you keep going.

Also I hadn’t lost an ounce of the passionate desire to beat him over the head with a large stick, and surely that was a sign of true love.