I've remembered that most life is about small, essential connections, so unobtrusive, so elastic, that you scarcely realize they're actually holding you together. The big ones-the great, grand emotional bonds-those are the ones that break, the ones that fail you, the ones that give way and send you careening toward the foot of the bleak and jagged canyon. It's the tough, gnarled, unadorned ties that really do bind, that never let you fall all the way down into darkness.

— Sharon Shinn

I was Amazement--I was Desire--I was Ecstasy and Rapture and the slightest bit of Greed.

— Sharon Shinn

She had something I could not have, and so I resented her—but I realized the fault was mine and not hers.

— Sharon Shinn

So do I wish I was to be king? That is not a question I ask myself. I ask myself, Would I be a good king? Would I be quick-witted and generous of spirit and full of that boundless energy? Or would I be clumsy and stupid and dulled by my own prejudices? I try to be a good man, since I am alive at all, and hope that that teaches me what I would need to know if I was ever faced with a higher challenge.

— Sharon Shinn

There is nothing but heartache for a core woman and a hunt man," she said, deliberately contrary. "He cannot control her, and she cannot change him."" He never fails her, and she always moves him," Darien corrected. "She can trust his strength, and he can be lifted by her joy.

— Sharon Shinn

You almost threw it back!' she repeated, and her voice filled with mock horror.' You foolish boy! Are you always so careless with items of value?'' No,' he said, abruptly sober. 'I know what matters. And I never throw those things away. I hold on to them as long as I can.

— Sharon Shinn

You can hardly walk up to complete strangers and say, "Good for you! You've risked banishment and brutality and ostracism just to be together, and I applaud your choice! Furthermore, you're in the vanguard of social change, and even though it's hard on you, the generations that come after you will have an easier time of it because you were brave enough to fall in love." So instead I told them I liked their baby. It means the same thing, but it's more socially acceptable.

— Sharon Shinn

You have not traveled enough," she said. "Or you'd know that every journey makes its own map across your heart.

— Sharon Shinn

You must welcome bounty whenever it comes, hunt man. It is often inconvenient. But if you insist on accepting it only when it suits your schedule, you will find yourself very poor.

— Sharon Shinn

Your wedding completely changes the direction of your life, you know, no matter how greatly you desire it. I think that moment of doubt and faintness comes from all those imagined and now impossible futures all pressing in on you at once. It is your last chance to experience them, you see, and they all want to be lived at that moment.

— Sharon Shinn