“Don’t you ever feel like you’re just a story someone is telling about someone like you?”

“Everyone is afraid of you and when folk are afraid of a person it usually means the person is cruel in some way, and I think you are cruel, Miss Marquess, but please don’t punish me for saying it. I think you know you’re cruel. I think you like being cruel. I think calling you cruel is the same as calling someone else kind. And I don’t want to run errands for someone cruel.”

“Here’s something I bet you don’t know: every time someone writes a story about a dragon a real dragon dies. Something about seeing and being seen something about mirrors that old tune about how a photograph can take your whole soul. At the end of this poem I’m going to go out like electricity in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it.”

“I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.”

“Just tell yourself a story that'll satisfy you and pretend he told it.”

“The smell of loving is a difficult one to describe, but if you think of the times when someone has held you close and made you safe, you will remember how it smells just as well as I do.”

“She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.”