“She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.”

“Some seasons later, the Princess of the kingdom was riding with her handmaiden on the edge of the dark woods. Though once she had been very ill, the Princess had recovered miraculously and was now ...”

“Hope, how she had grown to hate the word. It was an insideious seed planted inside a person's soul, surviving covertly on little tending, then flowering so spectacularly that none could help but ch...”

“Because desperate people cling to hope like sailors to their wreaks.”

“Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it...”

“She'd slept terribly the night before. The room, the bed, were both comfortable enough, but she'd been plagued with strange dreams, the sort that lingered upon waking but slithered away from memory...”

“You will be a different person after the storm, because the storm will heal you from your perfection.”

“Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it.”

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end...”