Rachel Neumeier > Quotes

“Some men are not capable of learning anything that does not agree with their own opinions.”
― Rachel Neumeier, The Floating Islands

“When we endure loss, the past reaches out to grip us from behind, but it's not wrong to turn your face forward.”
― Rachel Neumeier, The Floating Islands

“The grief doesn't go away, ... "But you...get used to it, you know? It's like carrying a heavy stone, one that's really too heavy for you: you learn to settle the weight properly, and then you get used to it, and then sometimes you can forget you're carrying it.”
― Rachel Neumeier, The Floating Islands

“The sea is made of salt tears we say and the waves are made of the griefs of men but I am sorry so many should fall upon you.”
― Rachel Neumeier, The Floating Islands

“A threat you will not carry out is no threat.”
― Rachel Neumeier, The Floating Islands

“Almost anything can be managed if one simply goes about it properly.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“It is poor solace to speak of the passing of time and grief," the master said. His quiet voice had gone somehow bleak, though Araene could not decide where in his unchanging tone the difference lay. "We do not wish our grief to fade, for it marks the love and honor in which we held our lost kinsmen. Nevertheless, permit me to assure you that while you may find peace a barren desert, yet eventually it may bloom.”
― Rachel Neumeier, The Floating Islands

“Trei did not stay to look out at the city, but went to find his cousin. He went smiling, and with a lightness to his step almost as though he were flying, for he felt at last that he had, indeed come home.”
― Rachel Neumeier, The Floating Islands

“The desert at night was black and a strange madder-tinted silver; the sky was black, and the great contorted cliffs, and the vast expanses of sand that stretched out in all directions. But the red moon cast a pale crimson-tinged luminescence over everything, and far above the stars were glittering points of silver.”
― Rachel Neumeier, Lord of the Changing Winds

“The sea is made of salt tears, we say, and the waves are made of the griefs of men, but I am sorry so many should fall upon you.”
― Rachel Neumeier, The Floating Islands

“A king who is renowned for mercy," said the Arobern, with heavy irony, "must also be renowned in equal measure for injustice.”
― Rachel Neumeier, Land of the Burning Sands

“Nemienne, who had never been able to summon fire into the peculiar heavy darkness of these caverns, found in her heart an understanding of shadows and darkness and black water that had never known the sun. She held in her mind the heavy smothering darkness, knelt on the stone, dipped a finger into the black pool, and drew quickly on the white stone the rune for summoning that she had seen on the hearthstone of Leilis’s fireplace. What she summoned was the patient darkness that lay beyond the reach of any light, the endless heavy shadows that could smother any fire.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“But even so, somehow the long shadow the house cast in the late sun seemed darker than it should. Or fell, perhaps, at an odd slant. Or into a place that wasn't quite the same evening in which he stood...”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“You should judge me as you would judge any man, by my actions and not by your fear.”
― Rachel Neumeier, Tuyo

“Blood and battle and years mortared the stones. He wondered suddenly whether they might be riding into a tale themselves; perhaps some traveler in some distant year would look down at this bridge and think, Beguchren Teshrichten crossed the river here to do battle against the country of fire…”
― Rachel Neumeier, The Griffin Mage Trilogy

“Fire will run like poetry through your blood.”
― Rachel Neumeier, Land of the Burning Sands

“Where your justice finds no answer upon the earth, O Sun, someone must take up the just cause. Look upon me in your rising and your setting, O Sun, and throw down your midday strength to me, because today I will step forward and I will never step back.”
― Rachel Neumeier, Rihasi

“Also truth, for truth lies at the heart of all illusion as darkness lies at the heart of the light. It was not you who cast glass and iron and pearl into the shadow. You have not the inclination toward truth,” said the dragon, dismissing him. Its talons parted, and the obsidian heart it held dissolved into the dimness and was gone. The dragon turned its attention to Nemienne. “It was you, young mageling, who cast the ephemeral and the eternal and the immanent into the heart of darkness, which is my heart.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“Of course. Also truth, for truth lies at the heart of all illusion as darkness lies at the heart of the light. It was not you who cast glass and iron and pearl into the shadow. You have not the inclination toward truth,” said the dragon, dismissing him. Its talons parted, and the obsidian heart it held dissolved into the dimness and was gone. The dragon turned its attention to Nemienne. “It was you, young mageling, who cast the ephemeral and the eternal and the immanent into the heart of darkness, which is my heart.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“The great house was not what she had expected, though she had not realized she expected anything until she found herself surprised.”
― Rachel Neumeier, Law of the Broken Earth

“Signing a letter in gold ink was a capital crime. But so many things were. Parricide. Fratricide. Theft, on the kind of scale Rihasi had already achieved. And those were only her recent crimes. Honestly, one or two letters signed in royal gold were trivial in comparison.”
― Rachel Neumeier, Rihasi

“The ash tasted of silence, she thought. Of silence and patience and the slow passing of time. It seemed strange that the memory of fire could taste of things so unlike the lively fire itself.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“Regret is fine; so is sorrow. That’s part of every important choice, every long step anyone takes from the present toward the future. But put aside guilt, or remorse, or grief.”
― Rachel Neumeier, Crisis

“For her part, Nemienne could not understand how her sisters did not see the strange slant into which light sometimes fell, as though it were falling into the world from a place not quite congruent. She didn't understand how they could fail to hear the way every drop of falling rain sometimes struck the cobbles with the pure ringing sound of a little bell, or the odd tones that sometimes echoed behind the sound of the wind to create a breathy, half-heard music pitched to the loneliness at the heart of the bustling city.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“Ferris,”
― Rachel Neumeier, Lord of the Changing Winds

“She stepped sideways through the dark after that rippling light, drawing her sister after her into the echo of some other place, she did not quite know where...”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“The wood was smooth and unexceptional, yet he felt a faint echo behind that ordinary surface, as though his hand might have passed through the door by some measureless fraction to touch something else entirely.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“That kind of ordinary light glimmered around the edges of her mind and memory in implicit invitation.”
― Rachel Neumeier, House of Shadows

“He had known that power requires to be used; that the world compels the exercise of power if one possesses it. And that necessity constrains what one may do with power.”
― Rachel Neumeier, Lord of the Changing Winds

“through a pearly morning mist that drifted across the city and glittered on the slate roofs of the houses and cobblestones of the streets.”
― Rachel Neumeier, The Griffin Mage Trilogy