Graceling Power Quotes

What Raffin's essentially saying here is, "With great power comes great responsibility." Sound familiar? If it doesn't, you have some serious comic book hero lore to catch up on. And Katsa? Well, she's eight when Raffin tells her this, so yeah, she's got some work to do. But the more control she has over her Grace, the more she can use it the way she wants to use it. And that, dear Shmoopsters, would make her one powerful royal.

Randa gets most of his power by bullying and intimidating others and using their fear—mostly their fear that he might sick Katsa on them—to control them. It's not particularly admirable, but it's effective. Until Katsa refuses to follow his orders, that is.

Sometimes people take power, and sometimes we give it away. Katsa gave a lot of hers away to Randa without even realizing it was hers to give in the first place. How do you think Randa managed to control Katsa for so long?

Katsa has been so brainwashed by Randa that she actually seems to believe he is the one who "chops off people's fingers or breaks their arms." She doesn't appear to realize that she is a separate individual and that she is the one who carries out these deeds. As much as she hates it when Randa looks on her as his possession, she too seems to have come to believe that she is nothing more than his weapon, with no will of her own.

Catch that hesitation just before she makes her big pronouncement? We like that Cashore wrote it that way, because it helps us to feel the tension of the moment and what a big deal it is for Katsa to take this first step toward independence from Randa. We can almost feel her taking a deep breath just before she says, "I won't do what Randa says." (Actually, we may even have taken a big breath with her as we were reading that part. Yeah, we're pretty sure we did.)

This is a great pep talk, and Po's right: it is her choice. Katsa worries that she won't be able to control her anger when she confronts Randa, that even though she has a choice as to whether or not she hurts him, she won't be able to make the right one. This is one of those situations in which her power is directly related to her control. The better she can control her, well… not her emotions, exactly—more like her reactions to her emotions—the more power she'll have.

That Randa—he sure knows how to push people's buttons. Do you know anyone like that? Someone who, with just a few words, takes the wind out of your sails every time you interact? If so, we have a suggestion: stop interacting.

Katsa feels really vulnerable when she realizes that she might have to rely on Po for some measure of protection, and she feels even more vulnerable when she realizes that she's fallen in love with him and come to depend on him in other ways. But being vulnerable isn't always bad—in fact, it's a natural result of opening ourselves up to others. Something we can't do if we're trying to control everything too much. Think for a moment about Po. He's okay with relying on Katsa as necessary. Does that make him less powerful? Or weak?

This is an important lesson for Katsa, and it makes us think of a Rolling Stones lyric. "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need." And once Katsa figures that out—that it's beyond her power to make everything come out exactly as she wants it to—she's able to forgive herself for her falling prey to Leck's Grace and move on.

Uh huh—and sometimes power comes from letting go of control and seeing what happens. And in Po's case, what happens when he finally stops trying to control and manage his Grace is that he finally realizes its full power. Which in turn, probably gives him more control. Freaky, huh?