Mercedes Lackey

It seems to me that evil is a kind of ultimate greed, a greed that is so all-encompassing that it can't ever see anything lovely, rare, or precious without wanting to possess it. A greed so total that if it can't possess these things, it will destroy them rather than chance that someone else might have them. And a greed so intense that even having these things never causes it to lessen one iota -- the lovely, the rare and the precious never affect it except to make it want them.

Adventure, yeah. I guess that's what you call it when everybody comes back alive.

Certainly no one has ever died of an unrequited passion__t's usually the ones that are requited that get people in trouble.

When you want something done, you ask a man. When you want it done quietly and without any fuss, you ask a woman.

If only. Those must be the two saddest words in the world.

It's just as easy to be lonely in a city as out in the wilderness. Easier, really. It's harder to get to know someone when you meet in a crowded place. People can freely ignore you in the city; they can assume they don't have any responsibility for you. When there are fewer people, (...) they begin assuming some kind of responsibility, simply because you naturally do the same.

...for a country whose people ceased to believe in magic soon lost much of their ability to imagine and dream, and before long, they ceased to believe--or hope-- for anything.

Kethry had once described summoning as being __ike balancing on a rooftree while screaming an epic poem in a foreign language at the top of your lungs.

I think I know why you never married, Sarah.""Well, and I reckoned if I wanted something that'd come and go as he pleased, take me for granted, and ignore me when he chose, I'd get a cat. And if I wanted something I'd always have to be picking up after, getting into trouble, but slavishly devoted, I'd get a dog.

Why, you mean you didn't get abducted and dragged across country purely to make us a story for us to chew over endlessly?" asked Pip, tossing his shock of tow-colored hair indignantly. "The nerve!

Ree-" Grey barked into the icy silence. "Lax!"The word spat so unexpectedly into her ear had precisely the effect Grey must have intended. It shocked Nan for a split second into a state of not-thinking, just being-Suddenly, all in an instant she and Neville were one.

Teach what you know, regardless of when you have learned it -- teach what you learned yesterday sagely, as if you have known it all your life, and teach what you have known for decades with enthusiasm, as if you learned it only yesterday.

I have no place in my life for someone who is sure he can do everything.

(From the Author Note at the beginning of the book.) Dorothy L. Sayers used to say that mystery stories were the only moral fiction of the modern world--because in a mystery, you were guaranteed to see that the bad got punished, the good got rewarded and in the end all was made

Keth, power brings with it the need to make moral judgments; history proves that. You have no choice but to make those decisions.

Truth and trust are the means by which civilization holds off barbarism.

There__ no such thing as `one, true way_; the only answers worth having are the ones you find for yourself; leave the world better than you found it. Love, freedom, and the chance to do some good _ they__e the things worth living and dying for, and if you aren__ willing to die for the things worth living for, you might as well turn in your membership in the human race.

Fanatics can justify practically any atrocity to themselves. The more untenable their position becomes, the harder they hold to it, and the worse the things they are willing to do to support it.