“It was as if knowing that I had to leave revealed something to me that only [he] could explain. But everything felt wrong. In the dim-blue daybreak I began seeing the the entire world reversed and spinning through a deserted tunnel of falsity and sorrow.”

“...so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.”

“What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”

“I began to feel again something that I had been only dimly aware of before. It was a small, surprising sense of disappointment even as he was kissing me, but the violins were so loud at the time I could hear nothing else. Now the disappointment was returning and with it the realization that the magic had come only from the moment, not from him. It was different with you. In the eyes and ears of my heart, you and the magic are one and the same. The setting never mattered. On the sidewalk in front of my house, at the enchanted place in the desert, walking the halls at school- where I was with you, I heard violins.”

“Narian scrutinised both me and the Queen, with eyes so deeply blue I could not break away from them. I was glad he was no longer questioning me, for those eyes made me want to tell him everything. At the same time, those eyes revealed something to me. Was he in love with Alera?”

“Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.”