“What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?”

“Then Cassie told her story. The feeling was like gathering up everything she's ever done or felt or known up to that moment and tying it into a ball and pitching it with all her might as far away as she could, and then watching to see what would happen next, what would roll back to her, what would have gotten left behind.”

“...joy was something she willed herself to show us, something she raised from deep inside herself as a promise for what could be. Now her life seemed to have opened up into it as if it had been waiting for her. (215)”

“Song and dance are explosion and interruption, and sometimes the only way to keep up with what's happening.”

“And now, the very thing that had earned her the right to call herself Adarlan's Assassin would be what sealed her doom.”

“Break the ice, or draw that which lives in the dimness out into the full light of speech - what happens is the same: that which is now seen and now grasped is not, in its clearness, the shadowy thing that was.”