Donna McMaster

“...It seems to me,” [Temeraire] added, grimly, a suggestion of a low growling anger beneath his voice, “that we are just like slaves; only there are fewer of us, and we are much bigger and dangerous, so we are treated generously where they are treated cruelly; but we are still not free.”
― Naomi Novik, Throne of Jade

“She realized he looked more at home sitting at her desk than she did. How did he manage it? Somehow, he found a way to mark whatever space he occupied. He might as well lift his leg when he walked into a room.”
― Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Match Me If You Can

“It seems very strange that the ocean is full of things that one can eat as one likes, and on land everything seems to be spoken for,” Temeraire said,”
― Naomi Novik, His Majesty's Dragon

“There I was, with a mare I knew I could do anything with—but the owners! Mary Pat had never even seen a jumping saddle. Her father had no conception of what goes into the making of a show jumper. But there is a lot of heart in that family, apparently a hereditary condition, for Mary Pat started surprising me. She was the first student I ever had who actually did what I told her to do. Older trainers had warned me that there would be such students, but I hadn’t believed them until now. Watching Mary Pat and Peggy, alone in the California desert, I thought of the diary of one nineteenth-century traveler who had said of southern California, “The mountains cut the land off from sympathy with the East.” I sometimes felt that God was whispering things into the landscape, in the breathing of that child and that horse.”
― Vicki Hearne, Animal Happiness: Moving Exploration of Animals and Their Emotions - From Cats and Dogs to Orangutans and Tortoises