Top 160 Megan Whalen Turner Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Rae Carson’s heroine is a perfect blend of the ordinary and the extraordinary. I loved her.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

52. “Today, she had yielded the sovereignty of her country to Eugenides, who had given up everything he had ever hoped for, to be her King.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

53. “I think a good book is a good book forever. I don’t think they get less good because times change.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

54. “What he brought out was a wooden gag they put in someone’s mouth before doing something drastic, like cutting off a leg.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

55. “I have seen too many men willing to fight to the death over a spilled cup of wine to think dying for a cause makes that cause just.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

56. “His forehead was covered by wrinkles brought on by a lot of sun and too much frowning.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

57. “Faith did return in extremis.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

58. “He didn’t marry you to become king. He became king because he wanted to marry you.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

59. “All the things man has made are eventually destroyed.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

60. “Costis followed, telling himself that it wasn’t true that he and the king and even the stone under their feet were nothing but tissue, transparently thin, and that for a moment, the only real thing in the universe had been there on the parapet with the king.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

61. “I would very much like to strangle someone. Why don’t you go away until I decide it isn’t you?”

— Megan Whalen Turner

62. “He couldn’t know that I’d overstayed my welcome one night while creeping through his megaron and had crawled up through the space where the pipes of the hypocaust ran to hide in his treasure room. I had slept for a day in stuffy darkness on the ridged tops of his treasure trunks.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

63. “When a messenger on a lathered horse comes to the city, he draws the eye of every person in the road. They see his direction. As he turns up the streets toward the palace, Rumor, who is born in a moment, is full-grown the next. She begins to move through the town, trailing ever more elaborate finery behind her.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

64. “Let the gods into your life and you rapidly lose faith in the natural laws.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

65. “She was the stone-faced queen, then and ever after. She had needed the mask to rule, and she had been glad to have it. She wondered if Eugenides was glad of his.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

66. “Calf love doesn’t usually survive amputation, Your Majesty.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

67. “Useless the Elder was looking at me in amusement. “Not exactly stalwart, are you?” he said.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

68. “It made Costis wonder for the first time just how much the stoic man really wants to hide when he unsuccessfully pretends not to be in pain.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

69. “That sort of news travels faster than horses, faster than boats. The messengers of the gods carry rumors through the sky the way bees carry pollen and drop them from their wings onto the earth below.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

70. “No friend had I made there, but I wasn’t with this group to make friends, and besides, he sneered too much. I’ve found that people who sneer are almost always sneering at me.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

71. “What would you do if you were King’s Thief, Gen? Chew with your mouth open in the royal presence? Chat with the court ladies, dropping the h’s at the beginning of your words and garbling the ends of most of them? Everything about you reveals your low birth. You’d never be comfortable at the court.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

72. “The prison keeper choose an inopportune time to look around the doorway into the cell. He and the king locked gazes, and the king’s eyes narrowed while the prison keeper’s widened.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

73. “On the bed, Eugenides stirred restlessly. “Upset at the sight of blood?” he said. “Not my wife, Ornon.” “Your blood,” the ambassador pointed out. Eugenides glanced at the hook on his arm and conceded the point. “Yes,” he said. He seemed lost in memory. The room was quiet.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

74. “The queen had passed him, so close he’d felt the stir of air, and he guessed that if she had turned her head, only a little, and met his eyes, he might have died right there.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

75. “No man can choose to serve only himself when he has something to offer his state. No one can put his own wishes above the needs of so many.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

76. “At one point I muttered, “You learn something new every day.” “What are you learning?” Sophos asked. “To keep my mouth shut, I hope.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

77. “Even before I recognized him, I smiled politely. Well trained, I would have smiled so at my executioner.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

78. “If these were death agonies, they were fake ones, Costis thought, and was sure of it when they reached the shallow stair at the far end of the reflecting pool. No one on the verge of death has the strength to pile one foul word on top of another like a man compiling a layered pastry of obscene language, from the the bottom step all the way to the top.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

79. “He shrugged. “We all spend our time under the sign of the idiot,” he said, and the matter seemed settled, at least as far as he was concerned.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

80. “Being six feet off the ground does give one a sense of superiority.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

81. “No! No! I’ll get the ten cups, I swear it!”

— Megan Whalen Turner

82. “Servants, in my experience, always know everything.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

83. “In the afternoon, the king and queen sat to hear the business of their kingdom. At least, the queen sat to hear the business; Costis was still not sure what the king was doing.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

84. “Coming from light into the dark, he was looking ahead of him, not down at me. My lunge, as I came to my feet, took him in the chest as I drove the sword upward with the strength of my legs. Even rusted, the sword slid through him, and I found, for the first time, how easy it is to kill a man.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

85. “I am a master of foolhardy plans.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

86. “Keeping a private guard this large is like using a wolf to guard the farm. It may keep off the other wolves, but sooner or later it will eat you.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

87. “For a moment Costis could see, not so much what was hidden but that there were things hidden that the king did not choose to reveal. Things that were not for Costis to see. There was no understanding him, but Costis knew he would march into hell for this fathomless king.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

88. “Only through pain can you be sure of the truth.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

89. “She is not so secure on her throne that she can risk offending her people’s gods. No woman can be.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

90. “My god is not a ten-devotee-to-the-average-dozen, got-a-priest-on-every-corner kind of god who is always being badgered by his worshipers. He keeps a very close eye on me, and what may look completely stupid to you is merely a demonstration of my faith.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

91. “Muse of poetry, come to his aid, I thought. Could the man produce one more metaphor of husbandry? He seemed to be trying. “Green wood,” I suggested, but even he sensed that there was something unfortunate about a metaphor for a king in which you dry out your royalty before you set fire to it.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

92. “She pulled the bedclothes up as far as they would go and suppressed a perverse wish to have her old nurse come to chase away the darkness, perverse because she didn’t know if she wanted the shadows to be empty or not.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

93. “Finally I went and found my hat and skewered it on my head with a four-inch hat pin. I wore the hat because I knew my mother never visited without one. The pin I thought would be a comfort in case of emergency.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

94. “Cowardice has its own rewards.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

95. “Attolians did not invest much belief in their religion. They dutifully attended temple festivals and used their gods for cursing and little else.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

96. “I cut off your hand. I have been living with your grief and your rage and your pain ever since. I don’t think-I don’t think I had felt anything for a long time before that, but those emotions at least were familiar to me. Love I am not familiar with. I didn’t recognize that feeling until I thought I had lost you in Ephrata. And when I thought I was losing you a second time, I realized I would give up anything to keep you-my lip service to other gods, but my pride, too, and my rage at all gods, everything for you.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

97. “Weak kings who lost their tempers were notoriously destructive.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

98. “Surely it is counterproductive to expect sense from someone you are beating senseless.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

99. “They are all accepted,” I said. It wasn’t important anymore.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

100. “I have a whole guard room full of brawny veterans who’d enjoy a chance to drag two Eddisians out of here, particularly if you kicked a lot and they could kick you back.”

— Megan Whalen Turner