The Sleeping Prince Quotes

“Fortune favors the bold." I smile weakly.
"So does death," she counters immediately. "The craven tend to live much longer than the heroic.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“That’s the trouble with knowing things: you can’t un-know them. Once you let yourself look at them, or say them aloud, they become real.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“Were you disappointed?”
She takes a deep breath, looking down at her hands. “My heart was. My head wasn’t. Most days I’m at war with myself. My head wins, usually. And for that I’m glad.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“Why do I matter to you?” I say, my voice breaking.
“You don’t.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
“Because I can. Because I slept for five hundred years and now I want some sport.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“I can see the things he doesn’t say, because they’re written all over him.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“I’m a king. My father told me a king can rule through fear, or through love. Fifty years from now, the people will love me. They won’t remember this – and those who do will consider it the necessary dark before the dawn. When they have prosperity, and security, and know their place, they will be content and they will love me for it. But until then, I’ll rule through fear if I have to.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“The apothecary, the monk and the living Goddess went to war. We sound like the start of a joke.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“Mysterious boys are not as enjoyable in reality as they are in stories" -Errin”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“Once upon a time there was a young apprentice apothecary who lived on a red-brick farm with a golden thatch roof, surrounded by green fields. She had a father who called her a “clever girl” and gave her a herb garden all of her own, and a mother who was whole and kind. She had a brother who knew how to smile and laugh.
But then one day her father had an accident and, despite her efforts to save him, he died. And so did all of her hopes and dreams. The farm – the family’s home for generations – was sold. Her mother’s brown hair greyed, her spirit dulled as she drifted towards Almwyk like a wraith, uncomplaining, unfeeling. And her brother, once impulsive and joyful, became cold and hard, his eyes turned east with malice.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“I dream of the man, but it’s fragmented: he’s there, but he isn’t. He’s always one room away, in a place with more rooms than seems possible. I run down endless halls, longing for and dreading him being around the corner. I hear him call out for me and the skin on the back of my neck tightens and prickles. I don’t know if I’m running to him, or from him.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he says in his low, ragged voice.
All of him is ragged: his patched cloak; his shabby gloves, the fingertips thin and worn; his scuffed boots. His words always seem to catch on my insides, like a goose grass burr, or a torn fingernail dragged across silk. His voice sticks.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“But at least when she has the beast in her she can see me. She can hear me. When she’s my mother I’m a ghost to her. Like my father, and my brother, except I’m still alive. I’m still here.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“If someone had told me six moons ago, before I watched my life slip through my hands like water, that my mother would be cursed, locked away, and drugged by my own hand, I would have laughed in their face. Then I would have kicked them for the insult and laughed again.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“I was robbed, Errin.” He strokes my face with his thumb before turning it back to him. “Of my life. Of my inheritance. Snuffed out at barely twenty-two years old. I have spent five hundred years asleep. I woke to nothing. The legacy my family spent generations building is ash, scattered to the wind. I was promised a kingdom,” he snarls. “I was promised the greatest kingdom the world had ever known. And I will have one. If it means cobbling one together from the ruins of Lormere and Tregellan.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“Burn all the food, and people will starve, weaken, and turn on one another. Destroy the temples and their acolytes, and the people will have nowhere to turn, no sanctuary, no charity. No hope.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“He never comments or judges, instead listening and absorbing and never telling me anything personal in return.
But I’ve discovered that you can learn a lot without words. And what I’ve learned is hard won, because – though he’s the closest thing I have to a friend here, and as far as I know, I’m his – I have no idea what he looks like beneath his hood. It sounds impossible. It ought to be; how can you call someone a friend, know them for so long and not know what they look like? Yet I don’t. I don’t know what colour his eyes are, or his hair. I know his mouth, and the point of his chin, and his neat teeth. Once I even saw the end of his nose when he tipped his head back to laugh. But that’s all. From our first meeting, to today, he has always, always been hooded, gloved and cloaked, and he’s never removed them, never even pushed them aside, whether we’re indoors or out. When I asked him why, he told me it was safer like that. For us both. And to not ask again.
Mysterious boys are not as enjoyable in reality as they are in stories.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“I think the worst thing is the way you lose part of yourself.” I roll on to my back and stare up at the dark, speckled roof. “There’s so much that only Lief knew about me. So many memories that we shared – mostly of things we shouldn’t have been doing – but now I’m the last one who remembers them. Times we woke in the night and stole honeycomb from the jars in the kitchen. Times we used to jump into the hay on the farm. No one will ever know me like that again. And what if I forget things? What happens then?”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“You’re here,” he says, and his voice is like sunshine, like honey, it’s warm and rich and moreish. “I’m so very glad.” Where Silas’s voice is spikes and edges, every word a warning, this man’s voice is smooth, velvety and beckoning.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“Scarron is the kind of village people are born in and die in. Rarely does anyone leave. Still more rarely does a new face arrive. So unless the girl is in hiding, like Silas was, I should be able to find her easily; she’d be known as the “new one” for the next fifty years if she stayed here.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“Mysterious boys are not as enjoyable in reality as they are in stories.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“Enough. I don’t have time for this; self-pity’s a luxury that I can’t afford.
Like bread. Or pride.
Enough, Errin. There’s work to do. Get up.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“Then he dies. He just dies. One moment his eye is bright and focused and the next… I see him die; I see the change. Indefinable, but something in him is gone, something permanent.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“I would have sooner believed in fairy tales coming true.
Of course, we all believe in fairy tales now. The Scarlet Varulv has slunk out of the pages and lives with me in this cottage. The Sleeping Prince has woken and sacked Lormere, an army of alchemy-made golems behind him as he murders his way across the country.
Stories are no longer stories; characters run rampant through the world these days. All I’m waiting for is Mully-No-Hands to knock on the window, begging to come in and warm himself, and my life will be complete.
Actually, no, that’s not what I’m waiting for.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“Other people come and go, but family is for ever.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“That's the trouble with knowing things: You can't un-know them. Once you let yourself look at them, or say them aloud, they becomes real" -Errin”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“But I've discovered you can learn a lot without words" -Errin”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“When you train to be an apothecary, you learn about composition and creation, construction and destruction. You learn to isolate elements and how to put them together, how to balance them to make the perfect cure.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“I knew all about the three branches of alchemy from Mama’s books: the aurumsmiths, who could create gold from base metal and so would never be poor; the philtersmiths, who could concoct the Elixir of Life and so would never be ill; and the vitasmiths, who could animate a homunculus, or - more terribly - a golem and so would never be alone.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“We’re not Lormerians, with their temples and their living goddesses, and their creepy royal family. We’re people of science, and reason.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince

“Silas’s mother walks to us, standing by her son. “We haven’t been formally introduced,” she says, looking down at Dimia and me. “I am Sister Hope, of the Sisters of Næht. We’re joined tonight by Sister Wisdom, Sister Peace, Sister Honour and Sister Courage.” Each ones nods in turn, though there’s nothing in their manner that would be recognized as friendly. Sister Peace even goes so far as curling her lip at us.”
― Melinda Salisbury, The Sleeping Prince