Sometimes you read a line and it sticks, maybe because it’s insightful or funny or worthy of debate. Here are a few quotes like that from Cordimancy.
Have a favorite quote you’d like to add?
“Maybe we can’t do anything fancy with a lip, or an eye, or an ear—but fat old hearts make great eaters of food, singers of songs, and kissers of cheeks. And we’re good with little ones.”
—Paka
“Even when a kind act doesn’t accomplish its preferred purpose, it kindles more light in the universe. It is never wasted.”
—Shivi
“Our men will bleed and die because of this convenient little fiction he’s spinning. Their families will suffer. War is starvation and pestilence and rape and murder, and that’s what Rovin is signing us up for.”
—Toril
“The union of body and spirit is the deepest privacy, at the core of a self. Forcibly taking another living being’s body is an awful crime.”
—Oji
“Search your heart. You’re naming all the time—even in the way you answer me. Just now, you reached into possibility and summoned forth a word, and filled it with blameless ignorance. You named your action ‘mistake’. Do you like the way that name shapes your soul?”
“Don’t blame me for a burden that you are eager to carry!”
—Toril
“There is a difference between food and kindness.”
—the old raja (Lin and Viro’s father)
“Loaves become bread by baking.”
“I was thinking that with a brim like that, my wife can get away with all the steamy winking she wants, and nobody but me the wiser.”
—Paka
“Meanwhile, we’re doing the best we can, and I have faith that it will make a difference.”
—Shivi
“Surely the blood of our people is worth more than a few drops of water.”
—Lin
“Boys and birds matter more, anyway.”
—Toril’s mother
“Just remember that the wail that new baby gives, and the joy that mother feels when the new labor is over, are just as real as the grief—and twice as precious for the price that’s paid. Sunshine eventually follows darkness. Not perfectly. Not in every story. But often enough to hope through the night… I’m not telling you that your problems will go away. They are real, and you need to face them. But you are made from stern stuff, Malena i-Toril sa-Teluilsir. Do not be convinced otherwise. Do not give up on joy.”
—Shivi
“He’s apparently just as stupid as most men, when it comes to matters of pride and power.”
—Oji
“Your words pull the universe toward the pattern you name. You shape yourselves not only when you vow, but even in the most casual speech. Naming is creation; it is an act of power.”
“You’d be surprised what a good man’s heart can hold.”
—Shivi
“You are not so different from someone you seek to help. Remember that.”
“Cook says I have to sing every time she makes blackberry tarts, and Semya says he can tell whether my song is good by how sweet his dessert is. But I think he’s teasing me, ‘cause cook always uses the same cup of honey.”
—Kinora
“Forgiveness isn’t finding a way to minimize what someone else has done. It’s not offering them cheap absolution, or talking yourself into some weird way of seeing things that pretends the pain is not a problem. Forgiveness is refusing to let the darkness have the final say in your heart. It opens its eyes completely, willing to see the good, the bad, and the ugly as they really are. And then it chooses to love anyway. Like Paka did.”
—Shivi
Sivanea 