How could you come once a week to talk about the weather and not mention a war?" Eddis sighed. "Will you sit down and stop shouting?" "I'll stop shou… - Megan Whalen Turner

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 know exactly when. I was hiding in a takima bush in the Queen's Garden, watching the older son of the Baron Erondites tell Attolia that he loved her. He was trying to propose a marriage and she thought he was talking about a poem he was writing. I was laughing like a very quiet fiend, trying not to make the branches around me shake, and then, between one heartbeat and the next, and to my complete surprise, it wasn't funny anymore." He rubbed his chest, as if a remembered pain. "I wanted to kill him. Once she was gone, I very nearly jumped out of the bush onto his head. Poor Dite."
Poor Eugenides, thought Sounis, to fall in love with a woman he had already made into an enemy.

"Who knows but that you will get up to find that the world has inverted itself yet again?" He looked around the room at the other attendants as if in warning, but spoke to Philologos. "Remember, the love of kings and queens is beyond the compass of us lesser mortals."
If anyone noticed, no one commented that he had called the Thief of Eddis a king.