"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… - Megan Whalen Turner

"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.

Ambiades, I realized, was the kind of person who liked to put people in a hierarchy, and he wanted me to understand that I was at the bottom of his. He was supposed to treat me politely in spite of my subservient position, and I was supposed to be grateful. For my part, I wanted Ambiades to understand that I considered myself a hierarchy of one. I might bow to the superior force of the magus and Pol, but wasn't going to bow to him. Neither of us moved.

"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.