Dragonsbane Quotes

“But that was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I’ve ever learned about anything—that she is her own, and what she gives me is of her choosing, and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it—and its choice to be there—are gone.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“Dragonsbane, they called him.

Slayer of dragons.

Or a dragon, anyway. And, he'd later found out, not such a very big one at that.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“There is no temptation from outside the heart.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“The diamond cannot love the flower, for the flower lives only a day, then fades and dies. You are a diamond now."

" The flower dies," Jenny said softly, "having lived. The diamond will never do either.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“We are like the whales that live in the sea, he said, civilizations without artifacts, living between stone and sky in our islands in the northern oceans.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“Maggots from meat,’” quoted John, “‘weevils from rye, dragons from stars in an empty sky.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“The room was a magpie-nest of picked-at knowledge, the lair of a tinkerer to whom the universe was one vast toyshop of intriguing side issues.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“She felt angry enough to curse them, but in her heart she knew that she could lay no greater curse upon them than to be what they already were.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“The pursuit of your power takes all that you have, if you will be great—it leaves neither time, nor energy, for anything else. We are born with the seeds of power in us and driven to be what we are by a hunger that knows no slaking.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“The key to magic is magic, Caerdinn had said. To be a mage, you must be a mage. There is no time for anything else, if you will come to the fullness of your power.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“After long years of solitary meditation, Jenny had come to accept that, for her, magic was a depth and a stillness rather than the moving brilliance that it was for the great.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“However, her own lack of power had taught her a curious appreciation for small joys and hard beauties and for the simple, changeless patterns of life and death.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“She had come to terms with her lack of beauty, but never with her lack of genius in the single thing she had ever wanted.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“Pitiful, puling, like all your kin the slave of time that rots the body before the mind has seen more than a single flower in all the meadows of the Cosmos.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“She closed her fists, one around the other, and pressed her lips against them, willing the rage and the fear to pass; and when they passed, there was nothing left. It was as if the unvoiced scream had burned everything out of her and left only a well of dark and unnatural calm, a universe deep.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“Holding his icy hands, she slid for a moment into the outer fringes of the healing trance and whispered to him by his inner name. But it was as if she called at the head of a descending trail along which he had long since passed—there was no answer.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“There are real problems, not just money and power, in my own lands.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“Jenny froze...cut by an unexpected pang of a hot jealousy she had thought that she had long outgrown—the bitter jealousy of her youth toward those who had greater skills than she. All her life she had worked to rid herself of it, knowing it crippled her from learning from those more powerful.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“The pursuit of your power takes all that you have, if you will be great—it leaves neither time, nor energy, for anything else. We are born with the seeds of power in us and driven to be what we are by a hunger that knows no slaking. Knowledge—power—to know what songs the stars sing; to center all the forces of creation upon a rune drawn in the air—we can never give over the seeking of it. It is the stuff of loneliness.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

“From them her hands moved on, random as her passing thoughts. She sketched vagrant airs, or snatches of jigs and reels, slowed and touched with the shadow of an inevitable grief that waited in the hidden darkness of future time. Through them she moved to the ancient tunes that held the timeless pull of the ocean in their cadences; sorrows that drew the heart from the body, or joys that called the soul like the distant glitter of Stardust banners in the summer night. In time John took from its place in a hole by the hearth a tin penny whistle, such as children played in the streets, and joined its thin, bright music to hers, dancing around the shadowed beauty of the harp like a thousand-year-old child. Music answered music, joining into a spell circle that banished, for a time, the strange tangle of fear and grief and dragonfire in Jenny’s heart. Whatever would come to pass, this was what they were and had now. She tossed back the cloudy streams of her hair and caught the bright flicker of Aversin’s eyes behind his thick spectacles, the pennywhistle luring the harp out of its sadness and into dance airs wild as hay-harvest winds.”
― Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane