“You always had an eye for the fellow with a decent helping of sausage and hard-boiled eggs.”

“The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.”

“It isn't hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.”

“It's hard to find evil in this world,' said the Witch. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.”

“The surface of the shoes seemed to pulse with hundreds of reflections and refractions. In the firelight, it was like looking at boiling corpuscles of blood under a magnifying glass.”

“A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him -so why bother?- but a female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible.”

“Skibbereen have a hard time at [math]; the best that the smartest of them can do with adding two plus two is guessing: three plus one. Correct, sort of, but not always useful.”