103
" They had begun telling each other stories about their childhoods and young adult years - adventures and misadventures that occurred before the great calamities that had sent each of them, ten years apart, into exile in Malinqua ..... But they never mentioned the calamities themselves - the circumstances, the occurrences, the conversations, the miscalculations, the emotions. It was if each of them had excised crucial years from their lives and spliced the remaining part together into one imperfect whole. Such a feat should have made them both seem younger, Leah thought, but the opposite was true. Each of them carried those missing years around as if they had spanned twice the allotted days; each of them had been aged by events. Each of them had been broken. "
― Sharon Shinn , Unquiet Land (Elemental Blessings, #4)
111
" I suppose that in general I am not a contrary sort of person,” she said, her voice muffled.
His eyes were narrowed; he was making no attempt to disguise the fact that he really wanted to peer inside her soul. “And yet you are the daughter of a sweela man,” he murmured. “You cannot be as tame as you appear. There must be passion in you that can be roused by something . There must be something you would fight for, or against.”
“I am a woman of water,” she replied. “I am more likely to slip away in stealth than to blaze up in wrath.”
He looked dissatisfied. “All men and women have a little wood and bone in them. Somewhere, from some ancestor. Something that will not back down. Something that will not give way.”
She turned her right hand palm up and studied the faint lines. “There must be bone in me somewhere, or I could not hold my shape,” she said. “But these days all I can feel is blood. "
― Sharon Shinn , Troubled Waters (Elemental Blessings, #1)
114
" way. The busy streets of Ghosenhall, crowded with thousands of residents and hundreds of visitors, some sad, some weary, some angry, some excited, most just concentrating on their particular task of the moment, calculating how quickly it could be accomplished and what their chances of success would be. Fainter, farther, but still, if he strained, discernible, a blurred oceanic mass of thoughts and feelings and desires from all the souls of Gillengaria collected on the continent from northeastern Brassenthwaite to southwestern Fortunalt. Scattered across that map, five bright, urgent "
― Sharon Shinn , Reader and Raelynx (Twelve Houses, #4)