Seraphina Quotes
"I watched them disappear into the crowd, wishing that I could have reassured her: it was good to see a dragon's teeth. A dragon with his mouth closed was far more likely to be working up a flame. That seemed completely obvious."
"And that gave me pause. All around me, the sight of those teeth was making citizens sob with terror. What was obvious to me was apparently opaque to everyone else."
"Forgive me, child, for including all this pain. There is no time to separate it out."
"I lie in bed, hugely pregnant. The sheets are clammy; I shiver and reel with nausea."
"It’s not about strength or weakness, Princess. Why do you imagine our peoples fought for so long?"
"Dragons envy us; that’s why they take our shape whenever they can."
"We didn’t defeat them, whatever you may have been told. Our dracomachia gave us approximate parity; they couldn’t win without taking unacceptable losses. It’s not a surrender so much as a truce."
"The dragons wanted these lands back. Goredd, Ninys, and Samsam used to be their hunting ground. Big game ran here—elk, aurochs, felldeer—in herds stretching to the horizon, before our kind moved in and plowed it under."
"Our people migrated here two thousand years ago. That’s ten dragon generations. The herds have been extinct for about a thousand, but the dragons do indeed still feel the loss."
"It is a princess’s privilege to feel no social awkwardness, ever."
"Our survival depends not on being superior but on being sufficiently interesting."
"Imagine you’ve got a terrible infestation. What do you do?"
"I’ve met women like you. Worm-riding quig lovers. You don’t know how close you came to hitting your head during your fit."
"I could take no more; I rushed away, skirting the dance floor, until I found a window. I unlatched it with trembling hands, desperate for air."
"It was just a joke between gentlemen, but I heard in it all the jokes they would tell about me if they knew."
"It was fear that permitted the Thomas Broadwicks of the world to flourish: fear of speaking up, fear of the dragons themselves."
"It could be done, this peace. It just took a willingness to do it."
"I am trying to give the second heir confidence, to make her proud of her people and their victory over dragonkind."
"You should have seen her alarm earlier at merely speaking with saarantrai. She’s disgusted and frightened."
"I don’t know who you are, but you have two choices: identify yourself, or wait for me to find you. You don’t want the latter."
"The room seemed suddenly colder. 'Do what? And more urgently: to whom?'"
"The borderlands of madness used to have much sterner signage around them than they do now."
"Even for myself, constantly monitored and obeying the law as best I can, this shape takes a toll."
"He hates him because, in fact, he... he hates him."
"It’s not a question of being smart, it’s a question of exposure."
"The master himself found me amusing. The more I snarled, the jollier he got, until he was almost giggly."
"An apple seller called out laughingly as I passed: 'Play us a tune, sweetheart!'"
"The entire cathedral was packed with sound, every cranny, as if sound were some solid mass, leaving no air, no medium to move through."
"Acoustics? Is simple. But I needt somethink to write with."
"Everyone turned to look at the enormous and unexpectedly graceful man balancing on the balustrade, doubled over writing, gabbling about his megaharmonium in intermittent Samsamese."
"I felt a pricking behind my eyes, moved by the sight of people pulling together to help a stranger."
"My love, let your answer be peaches and cheese!"
"Desperation gives you a longer leap, apparently."
"He smiled at the sheer absurdity of me, and I could not stop myself smiling back."
"Right now I’m merely Captain of the Guard. Half courtesy is adequate, and you may call me Captain Kiggs—or simply Kiggs, if you will. Everyone else does."
"They radiate evil! My soul will know, even if body and mind don’t work!"
"Your very presence makes other people feel awkward. You stand out when in fact you’d rather not."
"He wasn’t some dragon, coldly observing me. He was offering me something true about himself in return."
"That morose old twig! He takes it too far. If he had his way, we’d all be nothing but disembodied minds, floating and ephemeral, completely disconnected from the matter of this world."
"Would that be so awful? I said, my voice catching."
"If it was madness, Phina, it was such a madness as you or I could only dream of!"
"I stood so still, for so long, that I nearly jumped out of my skin when a voice said, 'Music Mistress? Are you ill?'"
"Tell Seraphina I leave everything in her more than capable hands. Don’t forget to rehearse smooth entrances and exits!"
"Stay away from Lars. He’s a Daanite and a liar and trouble incarnate. He’s barely human."
"You are the sweetest and most innocent of grausleiner. But there are people in this world who commit horrifying and unnatural acts beyond anything your naive imagination could conceive."
"The stage was beautiful but turned out to be unsound over the trapdoor in the center, as we learned to our dismay when five bassos disappeared at once."
"I thought about the human-faced lizard in my purse; I wasn’t sure he was right. That figurine spoke to me somehow."
"I have never forgotten, to three significant digits, even when I wished to. And here I perch, not forgetting Claude."
"The Ardmagar is wrong about that. I have never forgotten, to three significant digits, even when I wished to. And here I perch, not forgetting Claude."
"Why live in fear that he might find me disgusting someday, when I could make it happen right now?"
"The secret to performance: conviction. The right note played tentatively still misses its mark, but play boldly and no one will question you."
"Maybe lying is itself a kind of art. I think about that more than I should."
"Punching my piper? Flinging me into the wall?"
"You are off the program. Take your viola and go."
"That might be a dragon’s cesspit over there, yes."
"Everything tastes of ash to us, and our scales permit little sensitivity to touch."
"You’re going to an extraordinary amount of trouble for this Orma. You’re fond of him, protective of him—"
"If he loved you—I’m not saying he does—he would be taken home and forcibly excised."
"Today was Speculus, the shortest day of the year; by the time we reached the knights, we’d have to leave almost at once to make it back in daylight."
"I just turned thirty," said Maurizio quietly, "but I’m still called boy. Time has stopped out here."
"Dragons don’t work well together; they prefer an attack of opportunity, like the Zibou crocodile, and they’ve a devilish fast eye for an opening."
"You’re free to leave," said Kiggs. "You were just a squire when they were banished; technically, you weren’t banished at all."
"You’re allowed to ask for help when you need it."
"How dare the world be beautiful when I was so horrifying?"
"I want you to understand why I have to help him."
"Sweet Heavenly Home, Seraphina! Did you think about what might have happened to us if that hadn’t worked?"
"Female things," I said, watching him balk at the mention of the unmentionable.
"There is blindness in sight, and folly in cleverness. Be patient: even the brightest fire burns itself out."
"I smell nothing, and you don’t, either. Rumor changes with the telling; perhaps she wasn’t the one originally implicated. They all look alike, these common brutes."
"Do not imagine that being human is all it takes to regain my esteem, strumpet. My daughter may be a fool, but I am not."
"Why, yes, you are an idiot for following them into an empty laundry room. Did you imagine they had a fine pillowcase to show you?"
"You do smell of saar," she said quietly. "A bit of perfume would cover that right up. That’s how I do it. Can’t let a little thing like parentage stand in our way, can we?"
"You need help, on multiple fronts," she said.
"Whatever her mother may say, Glisselda’s no fool."
"… you’re nearly the same size," Glisselda squealed excitedly. "We’ll finally have you looking pretty as can be!"
"One in a thousand is better odds than zero, but zero is what she settled for. Because how could I love her if I couldn’t see her? Whom did I love, exactly?"
"That must be a wretched existence, forced to lie when you don’t want to."
"A thousand regrets I've had in love, A thousand times I've longed to change the past. I know, my love, there is no going back, No undoing of our thousand burdens."
"The peace depends upon your continued leadership. We have a lot to lose if anything happens to you."
"Merely that you aren’t as observant as you think."
"Who did the assassin intend to stab before he settled for Seraphina?"
"By all that glitters, I’m as stupid as you are."
"Why do you think you can come to Goredd and playact being human when you know nothing about it?"
"Stay. Help as you can; she may yet be saved. I have to make sure no one else dies tonight."
"My stomach does not take requests, little maidy! It directs me, not the other way around."
"You’ve killed the Ardmagar and half the royal family; war is coming."
"Being a half-breed has given me formidable abilities that neither dragons nor humans possess."
"You could at least have the courtesy to believe it."
"We may have to break the treaty to save the treaty."
"I think we would be something formidable, all together."
"My father had the same idea and found his voice first: 'I married a dragon. My daughter, whom I love, is half dragon.'"
"It’s no longer a question of dragon versus human. The division now is between those who think this peace is worth preserving and those who would keep us at war until one side or the other is destroyed."
"I’ve been preparing my case for sixteen years."
"We were all monsters and bastards, and we were all beautiful."
"The world inside myself is vaster and richer than this paltry plane, peopled with mere galaxies and gods."
"You, of all people, understand the burden of having to prove that you are good enough to exist, that you are worth all the grief your mother caused everyone."