Megan Whalen Turner Zitate

seite 3

“One cannot toss ambassadors back like bad fish," said Eugenides. "You treat them with care, or you'll find you've committed an act of war.”

“I can't leave her there all alone, surrounded by stone walls… She's too precious to give up.”

“What a strange world it is, where prisoners are left their weapons and the written word is a mortal danger.”

“All of my own impulses to balance and move seemed to conflict with those of the guards, and I was jerked and jostled down the portico, just as graceful as a sick cat.”

“Is that what the wine is for? To help you think?"
"Oh, the wine. The wine, Costis, is to help hide the truth. It doesn't work. It never has, but I try it every once in a while just in case something in the nature of the wine might have changed.”

“Eddis looked at her minister, curious. “Your head?” she asked.
Attolia explained. “He had to be forcibly dissuaded from strangling his son.”
“So have we all from time to time,” Eddis said seriously.”

“He couldn't offend the gods with a pointed stick.”

“I thought that being king meant I didn't have to kill people myself. I see know that was another misconception.”

“Who knows but that you will get up to find that the world has inverted itself yet again?”

“I know that if you don't look for an alternative, Sophos, you certainly won't find one.”

“She was the stone-faced queen, then and ever after. She had needed the mask to rule, and she had been glad to have it. She wondered if Eugenides was glad of his.”

“We are taught to treat a practice sword with all the respect of a real weapon, so no thoughtless mistakes are made"
"Oh… In Eddis, we learn to keep tack of the weapon we have in our hand.”

“Were you lying?"
"I never lie," he said piously. "About what?"
"The sand, the snake."
For a young man who never lied, he seemed surprisingly unoffended by the question.”

“That one,"-he nodded toward the closed door-" will rule more than just Attolia before he is done. He is an Annux, a king of kings.”

“The younger one looked to be completely useless.”

“The queen!" someone shouted in alarm, and the King erupted like a wild animal caught in a snare.”

“The queen was settling on the edge of the bed, ungainly with hesitation and at the same time exquisite in her grace, like a heron landing in a treetop.”

“The Thieves of Eddis don't have breaking points. We have flash points instead, like gunpowder.”

“If I couldn't be Eddis, I would be Attolia. If they needed to see my uncle in me, then I would show him to them. And I would take Attolia's advice because if I identified my enemy and destroyed him, Sounis would be safe.”

“That was the message. For me, alone among mortals, the gods send their messenger to tell me to stop whining. That’ll teach me to go hide in a temple.”

“The prison keeper choose an inopportune time to look around the doorway into the cell. He and the king locked gazes, and the king's eyes narrowed while the prison keeper's widened.”

“In the afternoon, the king and queen sat to hear the business of their kingdom. At least, the queen sat to hear the business; Costis was still not sure what the king was doing.”

“Today, she had yielded the sovereignty of her country to Eugenides, who had given up everything he had ever hoped for, to be her King.”

“If Attolia could look like a queen, Eugenides was like a god revealed, transformed into something wholly unfamiliar, surrounded by the cloth-of-gold bedcover like a deity on an altar, passionless and calculating.”

“As a ten-year-old boy, the Thief of Eddis could stop a grown man in his tracks with a single look. Where had that look gone?”

“I wouldn't destroy an entire house to destroy one man. But I would destroy a man to destroy a house.”

“Wrong arm, dear.”

“As soon as the guards where gone, I lay down on my stone bench and dumped the king and his threats out of my head without ceremony. They were too unpleasant to worry over anyway.”

“The factory doesn't like to hear too much talk about things it doesn't believe in. Contrary to what you may have heard, the factory has never found a single problem caused by ghosts. So if you meet any ectoplasmic spirits up there in the high crane, I suggest you be polite and they'll probably be polite right back. You're up there alone for fourteen hours a day, and you might find it's nice to have someone to talk to.”