“Magic isn’t nearly so impersonal; it yearns to be something, to become, to flower open, just as you and I do. You can see it in the seasons, in the weather, in the cycles of life and death. Magic has never been impersonal.”

“Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.”

― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand