Your records show exceptional intelligence and mediocre results. It’s a comfortable place, mediocrity. Never pushing oneself to the limits to see what you can take. Never staring down your fears, never reaching into yourself to find that last bit of courage.

The final book of the Fallen Gods trilogy by Hannah Kaner.

“Pain isn’t a competition,” I assure him. “There’s always enough to go around.”

A person could work and work and work, and still never “earn” their dues. Sometimes success meant determination… and sometimes, it was just luck.

Perhaps being too powerful, too unopposed, is a curse in and of itself, leading to boredom and dissipation, and the invention of imaginary enemies whose powers to torment were less limited than those of flesh and blood.

Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that came down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures. And of these histories most fair still in the ears of the Elves is the tale of Beren and Lúthien.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

And that, to me, embraces the very soul of the most important commandment you’ll find anywhere in your Principles of Successful Termination: ‘Do in others as you would have others do you in.’

Never trust a writer who doesn’t have too many books to read. Or a reader, for that matter.

Live long enough, you realize some folks can be handed a problem and some tools, and they’ll sort it out. And I never think twice about hiring that sort of fellow.

“The clearest evidence that justice is the most important of all the virtues comes from what happens when you remove it. It’s remarkably stark: The presence of injustice instantly renders any act of virtue—courage, discipline, wisdom—any skill, any achievement, worthless…or worse.”

The unsaid thing about funerals is that directly after the communal mourning for someone you love, after everyone is gone and the connected grief dispersed, comes a solitude beyond imagining. A great, gaping nothing where a whole person and life and future used to be. The other side of a funeral is abyss.

Because broken hearts strip vocabularies down to their raw bones…

When Kyra makes all the males disappear, she must choose her sister who hates her or the man who loves her.

No one keeps every book they read, which means the ones we do keep are important. A person’s library is like a fingerprint.

I don’t think we know what we’re made of until the worst moment possible happens. Then we must decide who we truly are and what is most important to us. I think we’re often surprised by what we become.

Endings were often found in beginnings, and she began to type what she knew.

The arrogance of men never ceases to amaze me. You all think everything has to do with you, and every woman has to desire you.

There is an old saying here in the Borderlands: ‘Better to have one woman on your side than ten men.’

You listen sharp, think deep, and guard your tongue. That’s good advice.