“Though you may be a wanderer, living out your days in exile, home is with you always, in blood-song and bone map, and in the echo of your mother’s voice as you tell her favorite tale to your children or the children who gather around you in the land of your exile. Home is your most constant companion.”

“To love you is her nature. But hers is a love from which no good may come. And your desire for her will lead only to cold, dark places.”

“Just as you cannot wave your hands and reappear in your simple life before coming here, so you cannot merely clap them to wake up the dead from their troubles.”

“To get ahead, sometimes you had to retrace your steps.”

“The past is a chatty companion, I can tell you.”

“Sense is the song you sing out into the world, and the song the world sings back to you.”

“Uncle seemed to take pleasure from knowing things other people didn’t. Silas did not like thinking this about the man who’d given them a place to live, but there was a sort of smirk hidden inside his uncle’s words that made Silas feel like he was being laughed at. He knew that tone. He’d heard it often enough from kids at school, from the ones who’d look at you like you weren’t worth talking to, from the ones who looked at your unfashionable clothes, or the shape of your face, and told everyone else that you were a freak. Silas was scared of those kids, because usually, those were the ones who didn’t think that normal rules applied to them, the ones who thought they could get away with anything.”