House of Shadows Quotes

“Almost anything can be managed if one simply goes about it properly.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“Also truth, for truth lies at the heart of all illusion as darkness lies at the heart of the light. It was not you who cast glass and iron and pearl into the shadow. You have not the inclination toward truth,” said the dragon, dismissing him. Its talons parted, and the obsidian heart it held dissolved into the dimness and was gone. The dragon turned its attention to Nemienne. “It was you, young mageling, who cast the ephemeral and the eternal and the immanent into the heart of darkness, which is my heart.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“Of course. Also truth, for truth lies at the heart of all illusion as darkness lies at the heart of the light. It was not you who cast glass and iron and pearl into the shadow. You have not the inclination toward truth,” said the dragon, dismissing him. Its talons parted, and the obsidian heart it held dissolved into the dimness and was gone. The dragon turned its attention to Nemienne. “It was you, young mageling, who cast the ephemeral and the eternal and the immanent into the heart of darkness, which is my heart.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“Nemienne, who had never been able to summon fire into the peculiar heavy darkness of these caverns, found in her heart an understanding of shadows and darkness and black water that had never known the sun. She held in her mind the heavy smothering darkness, knelt on the stone, dipped a finger into the black pool, and drew quickly on the white stone the rune for summoning that she had seen on the hearthstone of Leilis’s fireplace. What she summoned was the patient darkness that lay beyond the reach of any light, the endless heavy shadows that could smother any fire.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“The ash tasted of silence, she thought. Of silence and patience and the slow passing of time. It seemed strange that the memory of fire could taste of things so unlike the lively fire itself.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“But even so, somehow the long shadow the house cast in the late sun seemed darker than it should. Or fell, perhaps, at an odd slant. Or into a place that wasn't quite the same evening in which he stood...”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“Light slanted obliquely across the glass windows -- the house's one extravagent touch -- so that the windows seemed blind, nothing anyone could look into. Or out of.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“The wood was smooth and unexceptional, yet he felt a faint echo behind that ordinary surface, as though his hand might have passed through the door by some measureless fraction to touch something else entirely.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“That kind of ordinary light glimmered around the edges of her mind and memory in implicit invitation.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“She stepped sideways through the dark after that rippling light, drawing her sister after her into the echo of some other place, she did not quite know where...”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“For her part, Nemienne could not understand how her sisters did not see the strange slant into which light sometimes fell, as though it were falling into the world from a place not quite congruent. She didn't understand how they could fail to hear the way every drop of falling rain sometimes struck the cobbles with the pure ringing sound of a little bell, or the odd tones that sometimes echoed behind the sound of the wind to create a breathy, half-heard music pitched to the loneliness at the heart of the bustling city.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows