Top 160 Megan Whalen Turner Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “They are all accepted,” I said. It wasn’t important anymore.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “I woke to find I had not been murdered in my sleep.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

106. “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

107. “Cowardice has its own rewards.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

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

— Megan Whalen Turner

109. “As soon as the guards where gone, I lay down on my stone bench and dumped the king and his threats out of my head without ceremony. They were too unpleasant to worry over anyway.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “The king’s attendants remained, digesting the fact that their helpless, inept king had promised his wife to destroy the house of Erondites in six months and had done it in ninety-eight days.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

115. “The queen!” someone shouted in alarm, and the King erupted like a wild animal caught in a snare.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

116. “Do not offend one power to attain the favor of another.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

117. “Staring at the wall opposite him he presented the queen with a view of his ear and awaited her orders.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

118. “My father thinks that we should forget the old gods. He says that a country with two sets of gods is like a country with two kings. No one knows which to be loyal to.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

119. “The only thing I knew was that I didn’t know anything, really, about the king of the Attolians, and I didn’t trust him.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

120. “We might someday attain a relationship of mutual respect,” he said softly. First, I thought, I will see gods walking the earth. He went on. “For now I will have your obedience.” His ability to convey a world of threat in so few words was remarkable.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

121. “Phresine showed him where he could sleep, in an interior room with no windows, a narrow bed, and a washstand. There were chests stacked along one wall, and Costis guessed the dismal spot was probably a closet cleaned out to make room for him. Hard to believe the royal apartments, so lavish elsewhere, would otherwise have such a plain corner. Expecting better of royal closets, Costis went to bed disappointed.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

122. “But does a good man let his circumstances determine his character?”

— Megan Whalen Turner

123. “And she had the most appealing of feminine virtues, especially in a queen. She’s easily led.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

124. “The queen was settling on the edge of the bed, ungainly with hesitation and at the same time exquisite in her grace, like a heron landing in a treetop.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

125. “Everybody is always willing to throw someone else’s country to the dogs.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

126. “Eddis stared at him for a long time, knowing that forgiving someone because you have to is not forgiving him at all.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

127. “Ridiculous to think what indignities I would suffer in silence, if I knew that I was to be rewarded with an oversize bucket of hot water,” the magus said as he settled into the bath the servants had filled for him.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

128. “If the king could make a throne seem like a stool fit for a printer’s apprentice, the queen could make a rumpled bedspread into a throne.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

129. “What a strange world it is, where prisoners are left their weapons and the written word is a mortal danger.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

130. “Ever since the gods created the world, mortals have been forgetting from where their blessings come.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

131. “My gift is that I always know when I’ve made an ass of myself.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

132. “And where do I find a notary public?′ the enchantress asked. ‘Where? They don’t grow on trees where I come from, and while I might be able to arrange that one did, it would take time I don’t have to waste.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

133. “A natural! A natural!”

— Megan Whalen Turner

134. “It was like being lectured by an earnest, oversized child.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

135. “All of my own impulses to balance and move seemed to conflict with those of the guards, and I was jerked and jostled down the portico, just as graceful as a sick cat.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

136. “I didn’t really care much about anything, so I guess I felt fine.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

137. “Of course the servants had chosen not to follow me; I’d failed them already by refusing to be a man they could believe in.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

138. “I stayed only two days in the capital. I was welcomed by a cheering citizenry, who threw flowers at my head. It was disconcerting to think I could have put almost any young man in my retinue on a white horse and they would have thrown flowers at him instead. It was not me they cared about, only what I meant to them: a cessation of hostilities, a chance for prosperity, food on the table.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

139. “If I was going to climb onto an animal eight times my size, I wanted to plan the attempt first.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

140. “Even a steadfast enemy was better than a waffler.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

141. “Lying is just letting people believe what they want to be true.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

142. “He couldn’t offend the gods with a pointed stick.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

143. “If an author’s account of any man is tidy, you must believe it has been made so in contrast with the truth, which is rarely clear and never simple.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

144. “Power. What men like best for themselves and least in their women.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

145. “Pol knew,” said Sophos from the window.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

146. “Of course,” she said, “Your Majesty.” I admired the way she could make the words sound so much like “You Idiot.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

147. “The Attolian waited, far and away the best non-speaker I think I have ever known.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

148. “That is it, Sophos. You have hit upon my greatest fear. Someone who named himself Bunny is going to outshine me on the battle field.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

149. “Not everything that is easy for you is easy for the rest of us. Why don’t you go away, Dionis?”

— Megan Whalen Turner

150. “I am very good at groveling.”

— Megan Whalen Turner