“She had a knack for numbers and negotiation, and once, when Karel had asked when she planned to settle down, Elizka Novotny had pulled a wisp of curls from the corner of her wet mouth and said, "I am settled. I didn't grow daddy's business just to marry some dirt farmer who expects me to hand over the reins so he can make a wreck of it.”

“The townsfolk would assume, from this day forward, that Klara's death had turned a gentle man bitter and hard, but the truth, Vaclav knew, was that her absence only rendered him, again, the man he'd been before he'd met her, one only her proximity had ever softened”

“I don't reckon misery loves any damn thing at all.”

“You could rub a dry turd with a whole can of linseed oil, after all, and all you'd end up with was mess of shiny shit.”

“What are you doing?" she asked.Grimacing, he considered returning his mouth to hers and kissing her until she forgot the question and his strange behavior, but he had to know the truth. Dammit, he had to know. "Amelia told me that her toes curl when Houston kisses her. I was just trying to see if your toes curl when I kiss you." She turned a lovely shade of rose and rolled her shoulders toward her chin. "My whole body curls when you kiss me." "Your whole body?" She nodded quickly."Every inch." "Well, hell," he said as he settled his mouth greedily over hers with plans to keep her body tightly curled for the remainder of the night.-Dallas and Dee”

“Little Marjorie was born an only child some forty years ago. She had lost her mother at a young age and her father never remarried. All her life she had been cursed with the need for her ‘coke-bottle’ glasses with the practical over-sized frames. And then there was the unfortunate appearance of her protruding front teeth. She had always been a slight child, but when children begin to grow into young men and women, slight becomes scrawny and her lack of fashion-sense and self-worth had sealed her social fate. Marjorie had never gone to Prom, nor any dance for that matter, and when the boys chose mates and began the next phase of the great circle of life…little Marjorie Morningstar had not been included. --From The Great Northern Coven”

“I thought about my mother, and the words she said to me almost a lifetime ago. That’s when it clicked: she had asked me not to settle, to fight for the person I loved, and for the first time, I did what she expected of me. I had finally lived up to who she wanted me to be.”