Abby

“But that’s like seeing a picture of a tree, and then actually climbing up in the tree with the branches going every way, the rustle of leaves and the smell and the bark under your fingers scraping and the wind going, and a thousand trees all round your tree, none of them being special and dramatic, just trees, and your tree was also just a tree being a tree, and the picture you’d looked at might be perfectly nice as its own flat thing, interesting and pretty and well composed, but it didn’t have much to do with the reality of the tree.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“I was angry at them for everything they’d done to build it, and I also couldn’t stand to just turn my back and let it all come tumbling down. It wouldn’t have fixed anything they’d done. It would only have made an even worse waste of it all.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“Divinatory magic doesn’t generally work out well for many reasons, but one of them is because human beings aren’t very good at predicting what will make them happy. I don’t mean if you wish for something and then get it twisted in some horrible way like that stupid story about the monkey’s paw; I mean in the same prosaic way that you can sincerely be certain that you’d like a dress you see in a shop, and you buy it and take it home, and then it sits in your closet unused for years while you insist to yourself that one day you’re going to wear it, until finally you give it away with a sense of relief.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“In Tevinter, the mages made the greatest possible mistake. They chose to rule. In doing so, they shackled themselves to desks and appointments, using their waking hours to command men when they could have been commanding the magical forces that underlie the very fabric of this world.”
― Chris Bain, Tevinter Nights