Brandon Sanderson

When Shai is caught replacing the Moon Scepter with her nearly flawless forgery, she must bargain for her life and create--to Forge--a new soul for the emperor in less than one hundred days.

The Emperor's Soul

Larissa Campos

Control yourself, she told herself forcibly. Become someone who can deal with this. She took a deep breath and let herself become someone else. An imitation of herself who was calm, even in a situation like this. It was a crude forgery, just a trick of the mind, but it worked.

cassie

 No matter how good you were, someone was better. Live by that knowledge, and you would never grow so confident that you became sloppy. 

She calmed herself with difficulty, then plastered on a smile. Her aunt Sol had once told Shai to smile at the worst insults and snap at the minor ones. That way, no man would know your heart.

Even after all this time, the window had seen itself as something beautiful. Or maybe she was just getting romantic again.

That look of disappointment, that implication we should be better people than we are.

A person was like a dense forest thicket, overgrown with a twisting mess of vines, weeds, shrubs, saplings, and flowers. No person was one single emotion; no person had only one desire. They had many, and usually those desires conflicted with one another like two rosebushes fighting for the same patch of ground. Respect the people you lie to, Tao had taught her. Steal from them long enough, and you will begin to understand them.

Poets would point to a single flaw in Ashravan’s nature that had led him to failure, but a person was no more one flaw than they were one passion.

“You can’t manipulate people by being genuine.” “You can’t?” Shai asked. “Is that not how you’ve made your entire career? Speaking honestly, teaching people what to expect of you, then expecting them to be honest to you in return?”

The Emperor's Soul quotes

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