Sherwood Smith citations

“What's it really like to always be the prettiest person in a room? Dos it mean you're always acting as if in a play, because no one stops looking at you?”

“When in doubt, be ridiculous.”

“The only noise now was the rain, pattering softly with the magnificent indifference of nature for the tangled passions of humans.”

“Who in the universe halts when the enemy tells them to?”

“Finally someone takes me seriously enough to ask for my word of honor, and it’s a villain.”

“Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water.”

“Why is it the songs all end with the good people winning, but in life they don't?"
They don't make songs when the good lose," I muttered. "They make war chants against the bad. So there won't be any songs for us.”

“Except. What is normal at any given time? We change just as the seasons change, and each spring brings new growth. So nothing is ever quite the same.”

“No, I don't think I could fall in love with him, handsome though he is, because I don't accept any of that huff he gives me about my great beauty and all that. I'd have to trust a man's words before I could love him. I think.”

“Angry men with pointy things sent to secure a foreign city are pretty much alike anywhere. That's what I've heard. So far nothing's convinced me different.”

“So let me end with the wish that you find the same kind of happyiness, and laughter, and love, that I have found, and that you have the wisdon to make them last.”

“Because you showed one face to all the rest of the world, and another to me.”

“Everyone is an idiot," I stated. "Except me.”

“When people first discover beauty, they tend to linger. Even if they don’t at first recognize it for what it is.”

“I realized that despite how entertaining certain stories were, at the bottom of every item of gossip there was someone getting hurt.”

“It is a shame when we must regard a people as an enemy. It is a shame and a regret when the two peoples share so much. And it is a shame, a regret, and a tragedy when those peoples meet as individuals and find much to admire.”

“Probably. That doesn't make you into one.”

“War is a convenient fix for government problems if it happens somewhere else. To other people.”

“If your opponent is better armed and has longer reach, then surprise is your only ally. And then you'd better hope he's half asleep.”

“If more people recognized the difference between friendship and mere attraction, and how love must partake of both to prosper, I expect there'd be more happy people.”

“Are they trained to treat everyone as a servant?”

“Choose the duty that you can most effectively execute: that is, finally, all we can do in life.”

“What might have happened to them to make them the way they were? It did not change what they now did, but it changed, profoundly, how he perceived their motivations, their place in the world.”

“Judging the actions of the many by those of the one is both human and dangerous.”

“It desolates me to disappoint you, but your brother is not here. Despite two really praiseworthy attempts at rescue.”

“What if feeling good only comes after you destroy someone you hate?”

“He’d spent his entire exile schooling himself to face that he would never get what he wanted. People didn’t, sometimes. So you made a life as best you could.”

“That's not good, that's triumph.”

“I've been working hard at assuming Court polish, but the more I learn about what really goes on behind the pretty voices and waving fans and graceful bows, the more I comprehend that what is really said matters little, so long as the manner in which it is said pleases. I understand it, but I don't like it. Were I truly influential, then I would halt this foolishness that decrees that in Court one cannot be sick; that to admit you are sick is really to admit to political or social or romantic defeat; that to admit to any emotions usually means one really feels the opposite. It is a terrible kind of falsehood that people can only claim feelings as a kind of social weapon.”