Cold Magic Quotes

“I will either find a way, or make one.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“A kiss can be like the world turning over. It can be like the tide of a dragon's dream washing through the unseen world that is hidden to mortal eyes but that nevertheless permeates our being. It can be hot and cold together, as vast as the heavens and yet specific to the pressure of hands and the parting of lips. It raised more intense feelings than I had expected, like being engulfed in a storm of lightning.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“I lifted my chin. "All right then. You are always very precise when it comes to magic. So I've observed. And really, really don't like to get things wrong. So when you saw there were two young women, that day you came to this house, why did you not even ask about my cousin?"
His crooked smile made my heart turn over. "All right, then. I'll tell you." He paused as if gathering courage, before he forged on. "When I saw you coming down the stairs that evening, it was if I were seeing the other half of my soul descending to greet me.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“If we prosper only through the suffering or death of another, then that is not prosperity.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“...anyone can make a desert and call it peace...”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“What is freedom?" he asked bitterly, "and who is truly free? We are all bound by what we are, and where we come from."
"Maybe," I said slowly as I considered the turn my life had taken, the lies I had been told, "because we do not look farther than where we have been told to look. Perhaps it would all be different if we weren't afraid of what we are. Or what we might become.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“The young who are male can never resist showing off their knowledge, no doubt because they possess so little.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“All people are bound by ties and obligations, and the most binding ties of all are those between kin.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“Naturalists claim that however much the female may be said to love the accoutrements of fashion and furnishings, it is the male who is driven to display himself.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“We’ll smell of fish forever,” I said. “That would be nice.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“We are none of us one thing alone and unchanging. We are not static, or at rest. Just as a city or a prince’s court or a lineage is many people in one, so is a person many people within one, always unfinished and always like a river’s current flowing onward ever changing toward the ocean that is greater than all things combined.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“I think that when small-minded people envy and despise, then they will mock, thinking it their only weapon. I am not, I hope, a small-minded person. I will not mock you. I'll tell you straight to your face that I don't trust you and can't trust you...”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“That reminds me of a song,” said Emilia. The women laughed; the men groaned. But the fire was blazing and the night was long, and folk will want entertainment after the tedium of a day’s work. Emilia’s song detailed the amorous adventures of a water horse who fell in love—if love was the right word—with a series of young women who passed beside the lake in which the creature dwelled and from which he emerged in the form of a good-looking young man of exactly the right sort to catch a young woman’s fancy. She had a clear voice and a pleasing timbre, and every local knew the chorus, whose euphemisms about mounting and galloping embarrassed me. We did not sing these sorts of songs in the Barahal house. Rory caught right on and sang the chorus as if born to it. In the laughter and pounding of tables that followed, I said, to no one in particular, “I thought kelpies drowned and then devoured their victims!” The words, innocently spoken, only caused the gathered folk to laugh even”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“That was why I kept stealing books out of the parlor and returning them. For the only books I ever took were my father’s journals. Didn’t I have some right to them, being that they, and I, were all that remained of him?”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“How can it be men would put up with such an arrangement?'

'Why do some people demand it of women but not of men? It is just another way of doing things. As my father would have said, folk will have their customs according to their nature and their surroundings.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic

“because he stared at me with such a look as made him seem much better-looking even than he likely thought himself, and it is very bad to encourage young men into believing you find them handsome.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Magic