Patrick Rothfuss

“I shook again, tasted plum, and suddenly the words were pouring out of me."She said I sang before I spoke. She said when I was just a baby she had the habit of humming when she held me. Nothing like a song. Just a descending third. Just a soothing sound. Then one day she was walking me around the camp, and she heard me echo it back to her. Two octaves higher. A tiny piping third. She said it was my first song. We sang it back and forth to each other. For years."I choked and clenched my teeth."You can say it,"Auri said softly."It's okay if you say it.""I'm never going to see her again,"I choked out. Then I began to cry in earnest."It's okay,"Auri said softly."I'm here. You're safe.”

“If power is the only important thing, then Frodo loses against Sauron. Hell, if power’s the only important thing then Gandalf loses against Sauron. If magic is the deciding factor of a fight, then four plucky kids from England get their asses turned to stone by the White Which.”

“Music is a proud, temperamental mistress. Give her the time and attention she deserves, and she is yours. Slight her and there will come a day when you call and she will not answer. So I began sleeping less to give her the time she needed.”

“I slept and I woke. She gave me a ring made from a leaf, a cluster of golden berries, a flower that opened and closed at the stroking of a finger....And once, when I startled awake with my face wet and my chest aching, she reached out to lay her hand on top of mine. The gesture was so tentative, her expression so anxious, you would think she had never touched a man before. As if she was worried I might break or burn or bite. Her cool hand lay on mine for a moment, gentle as a moth. She squeezed my hand softly, waited, then pulled away.It struck me as odd at the time. But I was too clouded with confusion and grief to think clearly. Only now, looking back, do I realize the truth of things. With all the awkwardness of a young lover, she was trying to comfort me, and she didn't have the slightest idea how.”

“Lord but I dislike poetry. How can anyone remember words that aren't put to music?”

“She stamped her foot. She hoped the greedy thing shit for a week. She hoped it shit its awful self insideout and backward, then fell into a crack and lost it's name and died alone and hollow-empty in the angry dark.”

“I only know one story. But oftentimes small pieces seem to be stories themselves.”

“Half of seeming clever is keeping your mouth shut at the right times.”

“But it isn’t a rough draft either. The one I turned in several months ago was rough. There were some bad plot holes, some logical inconsistencies, pacing problems, and not nearly enough lesbian unicorns.”

“The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.”

“Sharing silence between us. Sometimes is all you can share.”

“I don't care whose son he is. I won't go belly-up like a timid pup. If he's fool enough to take a poke at me, I'll snap the finger clean off that does the poking.”

“My mom once lost track of me at the zoo and when she found me I was lecturing a man about the difference between dromedary and Bactrian camels. I was about 3 1/2.”

“Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.”

“His voice is like a thunderstorm, and his hands know every secret hidden deep beneath the cool, dark earth.”

“So much was so easy. Glamour was second nature. It was just making folk see what they wanted to see. Fooling folk was as simple as singing. Tricking folk and telling lies, it was like breathing.But this? Convincing someone of the truth that they were too twisted to see? How could you even begin?”

“There is a great deal of difference between a penis and a heart.”

“I'm a fan of books that are almost languorous in their storytelling. That is a little bit lost sometimes in the modern media that we have.”

“When you're 14, anything with a sword and a dragon is pretty cool. But when you're 21 and you've read 2,000 fantasy novels, you start to realize that some of those books, well, they weren't really good. OK, let's be honest. A lot of them were crap.”

“Just handle the books gently and you’ll get along fine.”