“And out the door she flew”

“Watch out, life is watching you!!”

“The fact that she was still alive felt wrong, out of balance. She didn't feel special, or protected, or gods-bound. She thought the gods had acted to protect the roan, and she had just been along for the ride. It was the roan who was special, not she.I should be dead, she thought. If she was dead, then all would have been settled. The warlord's men would have been satisfied to see her body swept away, the roan would have been safe from Beck's whip, the ghost of tyhe man she had killed could have gone to his rest. There was a rounding off - a justice - in her death. But alive, no one was satisfied and no one was safe.”

“Literacy could be the ladder out of poverty”

“Mothman flew away from town, like a giant bat, and then disappeared from sight behind a thicket of skeletal autumn trees.”

“It felt odd to have interrupted the life of someone she knew nothing about, to kill someone she had only just met, as though killing needed intimacy, deep knowledge of the other, to make it all right.”

“...there is usually a course to be found somewhere between laid-back and laid out.”