“She turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her. Im going to miss you when I wake up, she whispered, because she realized that she must have fallen asleep under the sun. Arin was too r...”

“Shed felt it before, she felt it now: the pull to fall in with him, to fall into him, to lose her sense of self.”

“An emotion clamped down on her heart. It squeezed her into a terrible silence. But he said nothing after that, only her name, as if her name were not a name but a question. Or perhaps that it wasnt...”

“It was wrong to want to touch a scar and call it beautiful.”

“Someone was coming through the velvet.He was pulling it wide, he was stepping onto Kestrels balconyclose, closer still as she turned and the curtain swayed, then stopped. He pinned the velvet again...”

“She had dreams that shamed her in the morning, dreams where Ronan gave her a white powdered cake, yet spoke in Arin's voice. I made this for you, he said. Do you like it?The powder was so fine that...”

“The sight of a worm excites my reverence more than all the gods men have invented.”

“For the natural polytheist, whose gods arise in and from the natural material world ... Our gods not only have transcendent eyes and metaphysical hands. They have antlers and feathers, hooves and s...”

“I sing to you of many more gods, gods of wind and water, gods of each mineral and the events that created them. I sing to you of the gods of protons, of quarks, of atomic forces binding and holding...”