There was something comforting about having a vast hydrogen furnace burning millions of tons of material a second at the centre of a solar system. It… - Iain Banks

Promises take many shapes, and the more…momentous they are, the more they might look like threats. All great promises are threats, I suppose, to the way things have been until that point, to some aspect of our lives, and we all suddenly become conservative, even though we want and need what the promise holds, and look forward to the promised change at the same time.

Of course, she does seem to be a rather good doctor. At the very least she has done the King no obvious harm, and that in my experience is far more than one might reasonably expect from a court physician.

That was the thing about traitors: they were people who’d already changed their minds at least once.