“Endless moons, an opaque universe, thunder, tornadoes, the quaking earth. Rare moments of peace; forehead up against my knees, arms around my head, I though, I listened, I longed not to exist. but ...”

“A man who does not like power will suffer from its cruelty.”

“In our time women can demonstrate prowess in a thousand ways. Long ago the great Princess Sun of Ping fought for her father, the August Sovereign. At her funeral, His Majesty called for the trumpet...”

“My position at the Palace is our one opportunity. Have confidence in my destiny. Do not weep.”

“In the closed world of the gynaeceum, despite the gardens and parkland extending beyong the horizon, despite the insurmountable walls separating pavillions and palaces, the tangled web of our fate ...”

“The moon in all her immaculate purity hung in the sky, laughing at this world of dust. She congratulated me for my carefully considered maneuvers and invited me to share in her eternal solitude.”

“Her voice is still pitched high, thanks to her youth, but it has a certain incipient darkness to it, a low richness that will mature in the coming years to the smoky tones of a priestess or a queen...”

“Once upon a time there was an empress, trapped as a ghost in the ruins of a jewelled palace, cursed to find another soul to take her place. At least, that's what the empress heard. But, as it turne...”

“If a tree is bent, every goat will jump on it.”

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that youve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you sa...”

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there i...”

“There are many things that make a man irritable when he arrives home from work in the evening and a sensible wife will usually notice the storm-signals and will leave him alone until he simmers down.”

“Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.”

“A lot of men wouldn't like being called a romantic. It's not macho enough.'Quite often men are fools.”