“one of the sisters started shaving her legs and marrying tax inspectors, so she was no good.”

“She was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence...they don't talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good...”

“I must go-- the aunts will be worried. Guy, I don't know if we will meet again, but--" Her voice broke and she tried again. "Sometimes, when you're alone and you look up at--" Once more, she had to stop. Then she managed, "If I cannot be anything else... could I be your Star Sister? Could I at least be that?"Guy dug his nails into his palms. Everything in him rose in protest at the fey, romantic conceit. He did not want her in the heavens, linked to him by some celestial whimsy, but here and now in the flesh and after the death of the flesh, her hand in his as they rose from graves like these when the last trump sounded."Yes," he managed to say. "You can be my Star Sister. You can at least be that.”

“Pauline kept a scrapbook into which she pasted important articles that she had cut out of the newspapers. These were about the courageous deeds that had been done by people even if they only had one leg or couldn't see or had been dropped on their heads when they were babies.'It's to make me brave,' she'd explained to Annika.”

“But of course he knew, all of them knew. There is only one kind of a person a wizard can marry, and that is a witch.”

“Dostoyevsky was her brother, Victorian children's books her passion and though she lived, when in funds, mainly on avocado pears, she took her bath each night with a different cookery book.”

“The dowager rose and slipped from her pew. There was the sound of tearing silk as she threw up her arms to embrace her son. Then:"Oh, Rupert, darling," she exclaimed in tones of theatrical despair, "don't you see? The game's up!”