The following quotes are from E.E. Knight’s Dragon Outcast, which is book three of The Age of Fire series. The first three are quotes from characters in the book that Knight highlighted at the beginning of each of the three “books”.
“A bad start is still a start.” – Tyr FeHazathant
“Fools and thralls talk of good and evil. Their masters think in terms of time and place.” – Tighlia
“Your true strength is not discovered easily, or without grief. Like a desert seed it lies dormant, waiting for the hard rain.” – Lessons of NeStirrath
These are some choice quotes.
The blighters staggered back up the hill, some throwing themselves into the first piece of cover to pant or tend one another’s wounds. The proud Drakwatch had an easier climb, being four-legged, save for the wounded. Nivom stalked right past his injured drakes and started up the hill.
The Copper looked from blighter to drake and back again. Dragons were a superior species in every physical respect. Their scale kept out arrows that felled the blighters, their crests could deflect a fall of stones such as rained down on the blighters at the ford, and their fire terrified even if it did not kill.
But the blighters would not abandon an injured fellow warrior to his fate.
-Dragon Outcast (185-186)
“Two-score dragons,” Nivom said. “Three will come over footsore and give up before they’re out of the Lower World. Two will get into a duel, killing one and leaving the other too wounded to go on. Six will see all the game on the savanna here and decide to spend the season hunting instead of in warfare. One will see a village in the distance, immediately attack, and it will turn out that he just burned out some headman of the king’s and will have to be sent back in disgrace. Four will argue with SiDrakkon about the orders he gives, and return to the Lavadome rather than serve under one they consider inferior to themselves. Two more will quit the first time an arrow goes home; for having shed blood honorably, they will consider their bit in the war over. Of the half-score remaining one will always be too ill to fight, another too cowardly, and a third will fly into a rage and die atop the first tower he sees. Leaving SiDrakkon with three reliable dragons again.” – Dragon Outcast (187)
He wound his neck around hers, squeezed her, then broke it off and looked across and down the river.
“I did enjoy that, however,” she said. “I’m told the Anklenes have some scrolls about how dragons can mate in a river, and it’s like flying. It seems delightfully perverse.”
“We’ll have to find out.”
-Dragon Outcast (252)
