Warbreaker

Hoid looked up, smiling. “I learned it many, many years ago from a man who didn’t know who he was, Your Majesty. It was a distant place where two lands meet and gods have died. But that is unimportant.”

“Priests are always easy to blame. They make convenient scapegoats—after all, anyone with a strong faith different from your own must either be a crazy zealot or a lying manipulator.”

you don’t understand a man until you understand what makes him do what he does. Every man is a hero in his own story,

Unknowing ignorance is preferable to informed stupidity.” “I’ll try to remember that.” “Do so and you defeat the point.

Yet she was beginning to think that she—along with many others—had taken this belief too far, letting her desire to seem humble become a form of pride itself. She now saw that when her faith had become about clothing instead of people, it had taken a wrong turn.

“I try to avoid having thoughts. They lead to other thoughts, and—if you’re not careful—those lead to actions. Actions make you tired. I have this on rather good authority from someone who once read it in a book.”

“This is most irregular, Your Grace,” the man said. “I hear that eating a lot of figs can cure you of that,” Lightsong said.

“My name is Gagaril,” the man said. “I’m sorry,” Lightsong said. The man flushed. “I was named after my father, Your Grace.” “After he what? Spent an unusual amount of time at the local tavern?

But he’d found that imaginary things were often the only items of real substance in people’s lives.