“When you grow up", I said, "do you ever stop feeling little and weak?""No," she says. "There's always a little frail and tiny thing inside, no matter how grown-up you are.”

“I said, 'Do you know what shoulder blades are for?'She giggled.'Do you not even know that?' she said.'Do you?''It's a proven fact, common knowledge. They're where your wings were, and where they'll grow again.”

“They say that shoulder blades are where your wings were, when you were an angel," she said. "They say they're where your wings will grow again one day.”

“I woke up and knew he was gone. Straightaway I knew he was gone. When you love somebody you know these things.”

“I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.”

“It happened so long ago I can't even be sure it happened as I say it did. Stories change in the telling, memory makes up as much as it knows. We were very small. The things we saw were all mixed up with the things we dreamed and the things we were scared of.”

“She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?" And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own.”