Bargains Quotes

“You didn't tell me this would happen."
"You didn't ask. So how am I to blame?”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“Your mortal lover has a mind like crystals," she said. "Sharp and cold. I would like her for my own."
"That's very thoughtful of you," was all he said in reply to this statement, which was appalling on a great many levels.
"Truly," the woman pressed. "Would you trade her? Your power is of the summerlands, but I will gift you with the hand of winter."
"Thank you," Wendell said; he seemed to be struggling to hold back laughter. "But I am satisfied with my hands as they are. And unless you have a key to my forest kingdom across the sea, I will not be trading my mortal lover today."
I was going to kill him.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

“She accepted the bargain without understanding the price. A terrible mistake, for an accountant.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“They promise us once-in-a-lifetime bargains in the orgies of consumerism that are Black Friday and Cyber Monday. More likely, we end up with precious little, vacant souls and an ever-decreasing appreciation of humanity.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Who knew what happened in a marriage, what bargains and compromises people struck?”
― Stewart O'Nan, Henry, Himself

“...know that the fair folk take a dim view of him who breaks a bargain once struck.”
― Daniel Thorman, Calamity at Conclave

“A fairy ring, it stated, is very much like a doorway, and in several cultures it is perfectly acceptable to knock. Though most American and American-antecedent ethnicities do not practice such summoning, some bargaining cultures did, or do, practice the art.
Alaine skimmed several photographs describing Sicilian stories of joining with fairies to battle witches and the Scottish worship of nature spirits, none of which seemed particularly relevant. She was growing frustrated at the author's apparent disregard for the separation between folktale and true practice when the chapter settled on a long description.
Recent research into English witch trials have revealed a connection between bargaining culture and some occult forms of practice in which fairies are ritualistically summoned. Though some equate the practice with the concept of a "witch's familiar"... Here Alaine began to skim again until the author found himself back on track. Interviewees from several small villages recall stories that those bold enough to enter a fairy ring could summon a fairy by placing a silver pin in the center of the ring, repeating an incantation such as "a pin to mark, a pin to bind, a pin to hail" (additional variants found in Appendix E), and circling the interior of ring three times. It remains, of course, impossible to test the veracity of such stories, but the consistency of the methodology across geographical regions is intriguing, down to the practice of carrying a small bunch or braid of mint into the ring.
Alaine shut the book on her finger, marking the spot. Impossible to rest, indeed. She opened the book again. It began a long ramble detailing various stories of summoning, but Alaine didn't need the repetition to know the method. A short footnote added that Mint appears to serve in the stories as both attractant and repellant for the fairy creatures, drawing them to the summoner but preventing from being taken unwilling into Fae, unlike tobacco and various types of sage, which are merely deterrents.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“We can twist the fate of your world and bind its luck up with our will, but we cannot make anything of our own."
"Make?"
"In Fae, nothing grows. There is no ore hidden beneath our barren soil. We must ply whatever we would use from what we are given in trade. Some things--- silk, silver, bone--- we can work better than others." Her pale fingers moved against her hair; a sheer filament of silver wove a plait of her mist-colored hair from one temple to another. "This was spun from one of your pins."
Alaine leaned forward, looking closer. Wrought into the thread of metal were flowers and leaves, their minute veins and even dustings of pollen worked in silver. "Everything that you have is remade from our world?"
"Yes." She let the breeze stir her hair and her gown, and Alaine wondered what scrap of silk ribbon had been stretched and unspooled to a thin shadow of itself to produce the diaphanous cloud of pale blue surrounding the Fae woman, the wonder of it almost enough to make her forget the reason she had summoned the Fae.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“Some have suggested that the preponderance of trickster stories in folklore ranging from the Norse Loki to the Coyote of the New World may have in their origins stories of bargains gone awry, though the opposite may be as likely to be true--- that stories of human pride's comeuppance are a commonplace theme.
---Changelings and Gambler's Chances: Tales of Fairy Mischief,
by William Fitzgerald”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“Sew me a shirt with no seam or needle-work. Plant an acre of land with one ear of corn. Build a house on a sinking cliff and win your freedom.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“You can't bargain away other people. Bargains don't work like that.”
― Juliana Brandt, The Wolf of Cape Fen

“The first Milesian to bargain with the Fomori had paid with her soul. This time, it would be them who paid with one of theirs.”
― Lanne Garrett, The Cost of Curses: A Cursed Magic Novel