Megan Whalen Turner Quotes

Why were these the only dances you knew?"
"Because no one would dance with me. Thieves are never popular."
I know why, thought Attolia, but aloud she asked, "Why are you familiar with the square dances?"
The music quickened.
"My mother taught me. We danced them on the rooftops of the Megaron. According to legend, the Thief and any partner the Thief chooses will be safe."
"You are king now," she pointed out.
"Ah, but they say that if the king dances, the entire court can safely dance with him."
"Spare me," said Attolia, "and my court, from dancing on the roof."
"It probably only works in Eddis.

If a man who claims to see the future is a fool,
how much more so, the man who believes he can control it?
We think we steer the ship of fate,
but all of us are guided by unseen stars.

I stifled a snort of my own in the silence that followed. The magus must have still been tired. He must have once known, but forgotten, that the minister of war had married the daughter of the previous King's Thief. He was talking to my father. The magus might have remembered this, might have recognized me from the first time he'd seen me in Sounis, but we had never been introduced. When he'd come with Sounis's marriage proposals, I had been sulking in my rooms.

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.

It matters, because I can't do anything more for this country, and it matters," he yelled as he threw the papers back to his desk, "because I only have one hand and it isn't even the right one!

"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 court is watching," she pointed out.
"I thought you wanted me more exposed to the public eye?" he teased.
"I reverse myself," she said coldly, "and argue for a little circumspection." She tugged at his hand, but he didn't release her. She gave up, unwilling to be seen trying to pull away.
"You don't think I can do it."
She didn't think he could.
"I don't care what they think."
She knew that. It worried her.
"No," said the queen, but she wavered.
He sensed it and smiled. "Am I king?" he asked, irrepressibly.
It was the one argument she was in no position to deny. She wanted him to be king, and he was resisting it with all his will.

He looked up from the where he had been carefully smoothing the embroidered cover, and seeing his face, Costis felt the shock like a physical blow. If Attolia could look like a queen, Eugenides was like a god revealed, transformed into something wholly unfamiliar, surrounded by the cloth-of-gold bedcover like a deity on an altar, passionless and calculating.

You don't understand your weakness, if you think the greater nations will protect you. We will see how much longer you rule your backwater, Your Majesty. You will soon enough discover the limits of your resources."
"Will I? I think you underestimate me still, Nahuseresh. While we are being forthright with each other, I admit I find it tedious.

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

I wouldn't destroy an entire house to destroy one man. But I would destroy a man to destroy a house.

...She's like a prisoner inside stone walls, and every day the walls get a little thicker, the doorways a little narrower."
"And?" Eddis prompted.
"Well," said Eugenides, "it's a challenge.

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.

I don't know how he would have gotten out of the prison on his own," said the magus. "It seems a foolhardy plan to have relied on my intervention.

Inside the case was a dueling pistol, a king's weapon, wheel-locked, chased in gold. Eddis had seen it earlier that day. When Sounis lifted it out and tipped his head over the locking mechanism, she knew he was reading the letters inscribed there: Onea realia. "The queen made me."