Megan Whalen Turner Quotes

Nahuseresh, if there is one thing a woman understands, it is the nature of gifts. They are bribes when threats do not avail." The queen shook her head. "The problem with bribes, Nahuseresh, is that after your money is gone, threats still do not avail.

You eat more than Gen did after prison", he said.
"I have more sympathy with him all the time. Are you going to finish that drumstick?" I asked.
"I am. Stop staring at it."
"What earrings?

"And we never get any older. Richie and Alex will always be ten. My sister and Todd will always be newlyweds. Angela will always be two. And I will always be the only one with no one my age to talk to."
"You have me to talk to," pointed out John.
Edwina smiled. "You aren't afraid to talk to ghosts?"
"Not at all." John realized the truth as he said it.

The king lifted a hand to her cheek and kissed her. It was not a kiss between strangers, not even a kiss between a bride and groom. It was a kiss between a man and his wife, and when it was over, the king closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the hollow of the queen's shoulder, like a man seeking respite, like a man reaching home at the end of the day.

"Gen-" Sophos started to ask another question, but I interrupted him.
"No," I said, "not Gen. Eugenides from now on. I never, never, want to hear Gen again in my life."
The magus laughed while I shook my head.
"You haven't spent any time in the king's prison," I said. "And you haven't had to drink your way through every disreputable wineship in the city of Sounis. I cannot tell you how sick I have been of cheap wine and of being dirty. Of talking with my mouth half closed and chewing with it open. Of having bugs in my hair and being surrounded by people who think Archimedes was the man at the circus last year who could balance four olives on his nose."
The magus looked around the books piled in my study. "I remember that Archimedes. I think it was five olives," he said with a straight face.
"I don't care if it was twelve," I said.

Grown more confident of the queen's humor, Relius said, "I had not pictured you for a fishwife."
"Lo, the transforming power of love."

"Treachery," said the Mede.
"Diplomacy," said Attolia, "in my own name," as the rest of her guard rose up from the grass behind their captain.

The factory doesn't like to hear too much talk about things it doesn't believe in. Contrary to what you may have heard, the factory has never found a single problem caused by ghosts. So if you meet any ectoplasmic spirits up there in the high crane, I suggest you be polite and they'll probably be polite right back. You're up there alone for fourteen hours a day, and you might find it's nice to have someone to talk to.

He looks--" Attolia hunted for the word. "Defenseless" came to mind, but it wasn't the one she wanted, nor was "young," though he looked even younger when he was asleep.
"Quite guileless," she said at last.
"Oh, yes," said Eddis. "I'm always willing to forgive him anything - until he wakes up.

As Attolia spun, she felt a tug at her hair and, turning back, felt another. Then she felt her carefully arranged hair slipping down her neck. Eugenides, minding the pattern with his feet and spinning the queen with one hand, had been pulling out her hairpins one by one when her back was turned. The rest of the pins loosened, and her hair dropped free. It swung out as she spun and the last of the pins bounced and slid across the marble floor.
The queen was several inches taller than Eugenides, and he leaned back to counter her spin. To those watching, it didn't seem possible that he could succeed, but with one hand, and no visible effort, he defied the laws of the natural world. Phresine, the queen's senior attendant, watched them from behind the throne as her queen danced like a flame in the wind, and the mercurial king like the weight at the center of the earth. Faster and faster they moved, never faltering, until the music shrilled at an impossible tempo and the pattern gave way to a long spin, each dancer reaching in with one hand and out with the other, holding tight lest they fall away from the other, until the music stopped abruptly and the dance ended.

And now we wait," she said, not bothering to hide her smile of delighted anticipation as her guards conveyed the messenger out of the door.
"Wait for what?" the Mede asked.
"Hmm?" Attolia focused herself on the present. "Good heavens, I don't know," she said. "Eddis produces such lovely threats when her Thief is concerned.

Staring at me over the barrel of my gun, Akretenesh said, "Did you not just days ago lecture me about the sacred truce?"
With my finger still through the trigger guard of the spent pistol, I lifted my left palm upward to the sky to see if lightning struck me down.
When none did, I smiled again. "We will have to assume the gods are on my side."
"I am an ambassador," Akretenesh warned me, anger bringing his confidence back. "You cannot shoot."
"I don't mean to," I reassured him, still smiling. I adopted his soothing tones. "Indeed, you are the only man I won't shoot. But if I aimed at anyone else, it might give others a dangerously mistaken sense of their own safety." I raised my voice a trifle, thought it wasn't really necessary. "We will have another vote, Xorcheus."
They elected me Sounis. It was unanimous.

"You said I should do something." Eugenides smiled in the dark, twisting the knife of his revenge a little deeper into the magus.
"I did?"
"As you were leaving, after your extremely edifying visit in the spring. You said ‘You could still do something.’ Your exact words."
"I meant talk your queen into surrendering, not destroy our navy in its own harbor!" the magus shouted.

"I didn't come to Sounis to blow up His Majesty's warships. I told you someone else had to do that."
"What did you come for if not to murder my king?"
"I came to steal his magus."
"You can't," said the magus in question.
"I can steal anything," Eugenides corrected him. "Even with one hand." He took a step forward into the moonlight and waggled his fingers. The smile on his face made the magus feel worse, not better.

The magus described the fighting with the guard in detail and made me look very good indeed.