Academ's Fury (Codex Alera, #2)

by Jim Butcher

Large things are made from small things. Significance is cumulative—but not always obvious.

Renzo was simply huge. Huge across, huge up and down, built on the same scale as barns and warehouses—big, roomy, and plain.

Moss fought a silent war with ivy for possession of its walls and roof.

Tavi shrugged. “There’s risk in everything.” Gaelle arched an eyebrow, and said, “Yet one so seldom hears of some fool drowning, starving, or falling to his death in a library or at the baker’s.”

“The office wanted every request in writing, and they weren’t supplying paper and ink to manage it with. The Academy refused to give any away during examinations, every shop in the Citadel was sold dry of them, and errand boys were gouging applicants for a bloody fortune to run and get them in the Merchants’ Quarter, bless their avaricious hearts.”

“That was a three-month course. How in the crows am I supposed to give you all of that in the next fifteen minutes?” “Cheerfully and without complaint,” Max replied, grinning.

“We live within a society, Isana, that has been built by a thousand years of toil and effort and war. We are by necessity victims of its history and its institutions.”

I have always found the man to be a spineless, venomous boor. I have often hoped that he would contract some wasting disease that would expose him to lethal levels of humiliation.”

You will probably find, in life, that successes and victories tend to overshadow the risks you took, while failure will amplify how idiotic they were.”