Keivan

“We can end it right here.'
When Triste finally replied, her voice was small, lost. 'I don’t want to die.'
Kaden stared at her. She had come so close so many times already. 'Why not?'
She shook her head helplessly. 'I don’t know .'
'There is only more of this, Triste. More hiding, more hunger, more torture.'
'We might get out. We might escape.'
Kaden shook his head wearily. 'It doesn’t matter. Rassambur isn’t the prison.' He tapped a finger against the side of his skull. 'This is.”
― Brian Staveley, The Last Mortal Bond

“If this was something I could cut out of myself with a knife,' he said, dropping her shoulders to bare his chest, as though exposing some treacherous organ, 'I would start cutting. I would carve it out if it killed me. But it’s not .' He shook his head, and finally his voice subsided. 'It’s been there all my life, since I was a tiny boy. This fear is part of every memory I have.”
― Brian Staveley, The Last Mortal Bond

“Life's a queue of small irritations with the Last Door at the end.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Half a War

“It was a look that gave her a tingle, all right, but not in a good way. In that look she saw her silly bloody hopes as twisted and broken as she’d left that Lowlander’s arm, and it was no one’s fault but her own. She shouldn’t have let herself hope, but hopes are like weeds: however often you root them out they keep on springing up.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Half the World