“When they finally went home, they left behind an unstable, unhappy part of the world, with borders like wounds scored across it.”

“The left tended to think people’s private lives should be their own, even if they made choices traditional Christian society regarded as immoral; but that people’s working lives, from how much they earned to where they worked, were fit for State interference. The right had a reverse view, that the State should uphold traditional moral codes with the full rigour of the law, but keep out of the economy as much as possible.”

“My words were Egyptian hieroglyphics before the discovery of the Rosetta stone; my words were wounded soldiers limping home, guns spent, from a lost battle; my words were dying fish, flipping hysterically as the net is opened and the pile spreads across the boat deck like a slippery mountain trying to become a prairie.My words were, and are, unworthy of Marianne Engel.”

“You're not weak at all. Wounded, but that's nothing to be ashamed of.”

“You are the single most amazing person, faery, woman in this world or the other. Because of you, I am a part of this strange new world, have a second mother, and . . . eternity. I have almost everything I could want.”

“Do you ever wonder if what you look at is the same thing everyone else is seeing?'He went even stiller at her side. 'Sometimes I'm sure it isn't the same...but that's not so bad is it? Seeing the world in a different way?'Creative vision creates art' he motioned around the gallery 'that shows the rest of the world a new angle. That's a beautiful thing.”

“The lights of London are burning bright across my retinas like we finally got our fireworks and I’m greedily breathing in Thea’s perfume as it clings to my receptors and she wraps my soul in a heart-shaped box.”