“God is another way of talking about the power to break things, that's all. When you mean to break a goblet or a bone, well, just do it and be done. But when the things to be broken get big enough you have to start talking about God.”

“Shows what you know, sunny-girl! I’m sure you’ve heard people talk about their Heart’s Desire—well that’s a load of rot. Hearts are idiots. They’re big and squishy and full of daft dreams. They flounce off to write poetry and moon at folk who aren’t worth the mooning. Bones are the ones that have to make the journey, fight the monster, kneel before whomever is big on kneeling these days. Bones do the work for the heart’s grand plans. Bones know what you need. Hearts only know want. I much prefer to deal with children, boggans, and villains, who haven’t got hearts to get in the way of the very important magic of Getting-Things-Done.”

“what did you think you were doing, then, when you went up through one door and down through another, turning this way and that, through the pages of a book and a deep mine and an entire ocean and the hideout of a wise old woman? My dear, labyrinths ensnare and entangle; they draw one inexorably inward-but it wouldn't be much of a labyrinth if you waited in line with a ticket to get it and the door was clearly marked, like some country-harvest hay maze. All underworlds are labyrinths, in the end. Perhaps all the sunlit lands, too. A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.”

“It’s up to you. Everyone should get to choose their own way, and that’s all I mean by yelling. But I shall choose to remember you, and it would be nice if it went both ways. That’s how it generally goes in my country.” But does it? September thought. If a body is hurt, they try to forget the person who hurt them and never think about the pain again. Remembering aches, like when I remember my father. It’d be so much easier to never wonder about him. I’m sure he remembers my face, but it’s hard to remember his, when he’s been gone so long! Perhaps memory is a thing that everyone involved has to work at, like stitching up a big quilt out of everything that ever happened to you.”

“A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.”

“God is a random event, a nexus of pain and pleasure and making and breaking.”

“Do you suppose you will look the same when you are an old woman as you do now? Most folk have three faces—the face they get when they’re children, the face they own when they’re grown, and the face they’ve earned when they’re old. But when you live as long as I have, you get many more. I look nothing like I did when I was a wee thing of thirteen. You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.”