“Boys were so proud - you always had to let them think they were good at things.”

“My dear, my dearest dust; I come, I come.”

“Can you believe it? They made me an ensign.""I didn't realize that things were going so bad.""Scary, isn't it?”

“They also learned that not everything broken could be fixed, and that not everything ruined cold be thrown away. Sometimes the damaged things were all you had to work with.”

“Peasants and princes, bailiffs and bakers' boys, merchants and mermaids, the figures were all immediately familiar. I had read these stories a hundred, a thousand, times before. They were stories everyone knew. But gradually, as I read, their familiarity fell away from them. They became strange. They became new. These characters were not the colored manikins I remembered from my childhood picture books, mechanically acting out the story one more time. They were people.... The stories were shot through with an unfamiliar mood. Everyone achieved their heart's desire...but only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for escaping their destiny. Every Happy Ever After was tainted.”

“Olivia: "Were you aiming at someone?"Alec: "...God, I think...”

“When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.”