“She realized with deep respect that this woman had always done what she had to do and faced what she had to face. If many of her fears and burdens would have seemed unreal to another woman, there was nothing unreal about her courage.”

“Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.”

“Somehow, she had grown into a woman in between the fall of kings and collapse of worlds. Once she had been terrified of change. Then she had been terrified of losing Elend. Now her fears were more nebulous - worries of what would come after she was gone, worries of what would happen to the people of the empire if she failed.”

“She was a woman of a certain age. A woman who wanted a man, but for whom romance was like a foreign country she had not visited in some time. . . .In the mirror over the dresser in her bedroom, she stared at her face. Some of the silvering had worn off the mirror, and soft, dark streaks slanting across the glass gave her image the aspect of a cameo, delicate, but distinctly antique. . . .She would not speak with the waiter in French, nor would she order anything weird, such as squid. Certainly nothing that would be strong on her breath, like garlic, because what if. . . .? She hadn't been kissed in thirty years.”

“In her writings, she despises her fellow man and woman for representing what she had lost.”

“My gran had always told me that a woman--any woman worth her salt--could do whatever she had to.”