"Blind, unreasoning terror is the first obstacle to be overcome if one wishes to survive a fall from a great height, but it is by no means the most dangerous. Fear can cloud the mind, but if one is on good terms with fear, as Tara was, it can also aid concentration."

"Her glyphs resembled spiderwebs laid by machine. Precise lines wove around her arm, spirals devouring spirals, hermetic diagrams inscribed with the script of half a dozen languages, most of them dead. A repeated symbol interrupted this pattern along the course of her radial artery: circle, nested within triangle, within circle, the mark of the Hidden Schools. The glyphs' light was strong enough to cast shadows"

"He sat behind the oak desk, clad in deep red robes and his own authority"

“Gods, like men, can die. They just die harder, and smite the earth with their passing.”

"Stories always outlasted their usefulness"

"A gargoyle's howl is only in part a sound carried on air like other sounds. A gargoyle's howl, like a poet's, resounds from spirit to spirit within the walls of a city"

"watch the city, and they do not change it as much as it changes them"

"Put not your trust in things, but in men. And women"

In three states is the mind most vulnerable, Professor Denovo had once told her: in love, in sleep, and in rapt attention to a story.

"A gang of cutpurses tried to mug her, but they were no trouble. Thieves in this city fled from a little fire and the barest hint of death"

tonight they hunted men of stone

There are as many different kinds of silence as of darkness. Some are so fragile a single breath will shatter them, but others are not so weak.