“Hubert's wife, Mindy, was a tiny powerhouse of a woman with a halo of wild blond hair and eye makeup so complex it took me a while to locate her pupils. She was clearly the brains of the operation,...”

“Some people say Earth is the bottom level of Purgatory.' She pointed toward the floor and frowned.'I call it the top floor of Hell.”

“You wish for what's called wooing. This customary game, where the man shows the woman that resistance is impractical, strikes me as quite pointless.”

“Just in front of her lay the Congaree Swamp National Forest. To prove it, a mosquito the size of a kitten landed on her arm and prepared to drill.”

“If in any quest for magic, in any search for sorcery, witchery, legerdemain, first check the human spirit.”

“It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if his song is surpassingly beautiful. ...”

“Magic or nature, they were much the same thing to Magnus.”

“Tall and built like a dense forest, Clint's broad shoulders made a girl want to learn how to scale trees. Except me. I wanted to start a forest fire.”