“All the Spirits of the Winter Realm, that just a moment earlier hustled around the Shifters as small balls of fire, were now in their ghostly forms, gray and transparent. Their ethereal bodies stretched parallel to the ground, huge eyes wide open, their wispy, long hair streaming in the air behind them”

“She opened her hand, and a ball of fire blasted from it toward the cloudless sky of the Realm. It whirled above the Shifters, growing and stretching into a huge flaming disc. It moved down, forming a spinning inferno wall around them.”

“For a second something deep and old rises inside me and I could fall on the ground and weep for joy, or open up my arms and spin. After being enclosed for so long, I want to drink in all the space, all the bright, empty air stretching around me on all sides.”

“Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.”

“At the moment the eyes of the body closed, the eyes of the mind were opened.”

“Down the Woodstock Road towards them an elderly, abnormally thin man was pedalling, his thin white hair streaming in the wind and sheer desperation in his eyes. Immediately behind him, running for their lives, came Scylla and Charybdis; behind them, a milling, shouting rout of undergraduates, with Mr Adrian Barnaby (on a bicycle) well in the van; behind them, the junior proctor, the University Marshal, and two bullers, packed into a small Austin car and looking very elect, severe and ineffectual; and last of all, faint but pursuing, lumbered the ungainly form of Mr Hoskins.”