The Golden Enclaves Quotes

“Intent doesn't matter, she'd say, when you've really injured someone else. You need to be open to their pain and anger if you're ever to make things whole between you.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“Also I hadn't lost an ounce of the passionate desire to beat him over the head with a large stick, and surely that was a sign of true love.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“I imagine it’s always easier to do something monstrous if you can convince yourself you aren’t going to, up to the last minute, until you do.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“We're all greedy, but children make it easier to be. We feel it's only right to give them everything we can grab, even when you know that anything you feed your own child still comes out of someone else's mouth.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“All of magic essentially involves sneaking something you want past reality while it’s distracted and looking the other way.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“It was exactly what I wanted, only once I was in it, I didn’t want it after all.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“Even when mundanes didn't have science to helpfully explain the world and happily burned witches at the stake, they didn't really believe in magic. If you believed in magic, you wouldn't drag a witch to the stake; you'd have her lob fireballs at your enemies instead.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“because if I was ever going to, I’d have done it already.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“me. The tea was even offered exactly in the same way that Americans always did it, namely with the faint hint that they didn’t really understand why I might like some tea, but they understood that this was the appropriate thing to do.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“The tea was even offered exactly in the same way that Americans always did it, namely with the faint hint that they didn’t really understand why I might like some tea, but they understood that this was the appropriate thing to do.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds,”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“Intent doesn’t matter, she’d say, when you’ve really injured someone else. You need to be open to their pain and anger if you’re ever to make things whole between you.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“in the same way you know perfectly well you ought to stop reading and go to bed and you’ll feel hideously groggy in the morning if you don’t, and yet you keep going.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“We're all greedy, btu children make it easier to be. We feel it's only right to give them everything we can grab, even when you know that anything you feed your own child still comes out of someone else's mouth.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“Mum told me she’d helped her resolve a corruption of perception that had lodged itself too deep into her imagination. If that doesn’t tell you much, just avoid consuming too many alchemical substances in unreal spaces and it won’t happen to you.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“you know perfectly well you ought to stop reading and go to bed and you’ll feel hideously groggy in the morning if you don’t,”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“we ought to have gone back up and started at the library, but we didn’t, in the same way you know perfectly well you ought to stop reading and go to bed and you’ll feel hideously groggy in the morning if you don’t, and yet you keep going.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“The food wasn’t as bad as the Scholomance cafeteria, which was as much as you could really say for it, although they presented it with the confident triumph of someone offering you marvels of the culinary art, complete with heavy white napkins and inconvenient cutlery that repeatedly threatened to fall down and disappear into the crevices of the seat or into spots unreachable except by someone with arms like a flamingo’s legs.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“If we were going to do an exhaustive search, we ought to have gone back up and started at the library, but we didn’t, in the same way you know perfectly well you ought to stop reading and go to bed and you’ll feel hideously groggy in the morning if you don’t, and yet you keep going.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“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

“At the sound of her voice, her voice caring about me, I had to go blindly stumbling off to the side of the corridor, nearly running into people going by in both directions, and turn myself to face the wall so I wouldn't just go into a fit of blubbing.

Aadhya managed to conference Liu in while I got myself under control. Hearing both their voices prolonged the struggle, though. If I shut my eyes, I could be back in one of our dorm rooms, sitting together [...] and I couldn't want to be back in the Scholomance, but I did want to be with them again. I wanted the circle of their arms around me, so desperately.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“You should pack up your statuary and go home.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“I'm going to leave it at that, because I don't remember most of it, actually. I got through it one minute at a time, and let each one go as soon as I'd got through it, because here came another one.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“Her & Dad & Mum, all of them one after the other in a line putting love & courage and the deep mana of willing self-sacrifice into the universe.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“When you speak the future, you shape the future.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“I was seeing whispers and wind chimes — not solid wind chimes dangling, which would have been all right; I was seeing the sound of wind chimes, and don’t ask me to describe it.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“Yancy was the only name she used, and whenever a scruffier sort of wizard came to the commune looking for help, more often than not they said she’d sent them, with her respects. Once, I’d asked why, and Mum told me she’d helped her resolve a corruption of perception that had lodged itself too deep into her imagination. If that doesn’t tell you much, just avoid consuming too many alchemical substances in unreal spaces and it won’t happen to you.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“Most of the denizens don’t care what the council are doing as long as everything keeps running smoothly from their own perspective, and the only people who get a significant vote anyway are the people who’ve earned a council seat, either by doing something dramatic or because they’ve cleverly arranged to be descended from a founding member.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“I managed to behave like a human being and hug her back, my throat tight.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“Also it was hot as Satan’s tit, to put it in the most colorful terms possible”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves