Jacque

“If you try to breathe water, you will not turn into a fish, you will drown; but water is still good to drink.”
― Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown

“Galanna's gift, it was dryly said, was to be impossible to please.”
― Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown

“He looked at her for a moment, amazed. "How did you know that? How can a servant girl like you understand so much?"

Because self-absorbed man-children are common as weeds, thought Mary. But she said, "I don't know, sir. I only guessed.”
― Y.S. Lee, The Traitor in the Tunnel

“She caught her father one day at breakfast, between ministers with tactical problems and councillors with strategic ones. His face lit up when he saw her, and she made an embarrassed mental note to seek him out more often; he was not a man who had ever been able to enter into a child's games, but she might have noticed before this how wistfully he looked at her. But for perhaps the first time she was recognizing that wistfulness for what it was, the awkwardness of a father's love for a daughter he doesn't know how to talk to, not shame for what Aerin was, or could or could not do.”
― Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown