Bellaro

“I wish to God,” said Gideon with mild exasperation, “that you’d talk—just once—in prose like other people.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“Then Lymond’s voice, the chill gone, said, ‘Don’t be an ass, Jerott? You know I can’t do without you.’ It was an obvious answer. But it was also something Jerott had never had from Lymond before: an apology and an appeal both at once.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, Pawn in Frankincense

“Don’t interrupt,’ one of the boys said. ‘He’ll lose his life.’
Seeing it was a matter of life and death, Sophie and Michael backed toward the door. But Howl, quite unperturbed at killing his nephew, strode over to the wall and pulled the boxes up by the roots.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“What does that mean, the way people are?” “Customs! Manners! Languages! The ten thousand gods of ten thousand nations! The tales they tell their children when they wake from nightmares, the tales they tell their sons and daughters when they send them off to war, the tales a midwife tells a laboring mother, the tales old men tell each other in the twilight of their lives.” “So you are a spy—sort of.”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths