Tom Holt

"The knight raises both eyebrows, like someone by Burne-Jones whos just trodden on something sharp. I am Prince Boamund, eldest son of King - Boamund? Thats right, says the knight, Boamund, eldest son of - How do you spell that? Boamund looks worried. Where he comes from you can take advanced falconry, or you can take spelling; not both. Guess which one he opted for. - c. 1"

"Why get so worked up about a nonexistent threat? Answer: someone somewhere is covering something up."

"It may not be true, but it provides a much-needed focal point for baffled indignation."

"He knew of course that there was such a thing as love, and that if you happen to come across it, as most people seem to do, it is not a thing that you can avoid, or that you should want to avoid. But you cannot go out and find it, because it is not that sort of creature. The phrase “to fall in love,” he realized, is a singularly apt one; it is something you blunder into, like a pothole. Very like a pothole."

"“So youve never had any urge to rule the world, or anything like that?” “What, me?” Vanderdecker said. “No, I cant say I have. It would be nice to change some things, naturally.” Jane leaned forward and looked serious. “Such as?” Vanderdecker considered. “I dont know,” he said, “now you come to mention it. I cant actually think of anything that even remotely matters. You get such a wonderful sense of perspective at my age.”"

"On the way out, I reflected on the way in which so many mortals pray. It’s strictly a rational proposition. If He exists, they argue, it’s best to be on the right side of Him; if He doesn’t, well, no harm done, it hasn’t cost anything. I’m not like that, unfortunately. Either I believe or I don’t. And I believed—thought I believed—in the doctrines of Saloninus concerning the invalidity of conventional morality. I believed that there are no absolutes of good and evil and that all that matters, in the final analysis, is which side you’re on. It was, I felt, a doctrine which accorded exactly with my own observations and experience. The problems start when your side isn’t on your side anymore."

"“It was basically a form of gambling, and it went something like this. “The Fuggers would think of something that was extremely unlikely to happen, and then they would persuade someone to wager them money that it would. Now the proper term for this arrangement is a sucker bet, but the Fuggers wanted to find a respectable name for it, so they called it Insurance. It caught on, just as they knew it would, and soon it became so respectable that they were able to get people to make a new bet every year, and they called this sort of bet a premium.”"

"I see what you mean about making a will, actually, although I still maintain that forty quid spent on deciding whats going to happen after youre dead is a waste of good beer money."

"It was an indescribably beautiful thing, with the perfection of line and form that only something designed to be functional can have, lean and graceful and infinitely menacing, like a man-eating swan."

"Jane was a child of the media age, and there lurked in the back of her mind the instinctive belief that if a thing wasnt on the news, it couldnt really have happened after all."

"Perhaps it was some magic in those extraordinary letters, first created at a time when any writing was by definition magical, a secret mark on silent metal that could communicate without speech to the eyes of a wise lore-master. Runes cannot help being magical, even if what they spell out is commonplace."

"Well, its a bit late now, isnt it? Besides, I never could be doing with lawyers. Did you ever meet a lawyer whose life you would willingly have saved in the event of fire? Not me."