“Ah, my poor child, how far gone you are in your blindness! Why did you have me summoned?""I had hopes, I had hopes.""Hopes? Hopes of what?""I do not know. The things we hope for are always the things we do not know.”

“How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die”

“You should thank me for tolerating you. I had hoped that becoming a royal would cure your foul manners.""That's interesting. My father hoped that stripping me of royalty would do the same thing.”

“Though it pained me, I gave in. Why was it that I repeatedly succumbed to the first whisper of a promised maybe? How did the enticer, hope, always find my heart unguarded? There was no such thing as hope. Not for me. Why was it so hard to accept that?”

“I hope they know how lucky they are to have you. But that doesn't mean I will ever stop trying to have you for myself. You know as well as I do, Meena, that we belong together. I hope that day will come sometime soon. In the meantime: truce. With all the love in my heart, Lucien”

“How do we know we're not people in a movie?' she asked.I looked at her not knowing how to reply.Mama, [...] how do we know that things are real?'Great. Now we have a junior existentialist in the house.Well, we don't know. We just have to hope that what we think is real is real.'But how do we know?' she asked, insistently.Ah, a scientist, who wants empirical evidence.We don't know. We just have to hope.'Mama, how do we know things aren't a dream? You know, how sometimes life feels like a dream? Do you ever feel that way?'Yes, sweetie, I feel that way all the time.”