“If you say a word, it leaps out and becomes the truth. I love you. I believe it. I believe I am loveable. How can something as fragile as a word build a whole world?”

“Once we got to eating, the idea of happiness returned to me. Not the feeling, the idea. Would a regular girl be happy simply eating a hot meal with a great deal of chew to it? Maybe happiness is a ...”

“I think about the Old Ones, that they have a past but no history. I think about the inevitability of death, and whether its not that very inevitability that inspires us to take photographs and make...”

“This is what I want. I want people to take care of me. I want them to force comfort upon me. I want the soft-pillow feeling that I associate with memories of being ill when I was younger, soft pill...”

“Life and stories are alike in one way: They are full of hollows. The king and queen have no children: They have a child hollow. The girl has a wicked stepmother: She has a mother hollow. In a story...”

“I have a theory about how she might have managed to pull off such a feat. It comes in the form of an equation: Love + Fear = Herculean Strength. Its how mothers come to fling runaway motorcars from...”

“There are all these relationships that are like cookie cutter shapes; identical and repetitive. Then there are all these relationships that aren't even relationships! Just facades for show and tell...”

“But witchy magic doesnt listen to please and pretty please, and anyway, I didnt really care. I only pretended to care because not caring makes me a monster.”

“All that day she felt as if she were acting in a theatre with better actors than herself, and that her bad performance was spoiling the whole affair.”

“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.”

“And oh, how she pitched herself into things. She would draw pictures all day long for weeks on end, then throw out the pencils and never draw another thing. Then it was embroidery with her, she had...”

“I knew the woodsy fragrance that accompanied Reed was his natural scent. It was one of the many things that made him hard to resist.”

“My whole world started to tilt. I could feel it, sliding ever so slightly off center.”