“I am not tormented, Fern responded. I am... diminished. I have always believed that your soul grows when you do something that is good and brave, a right thing, a true thing, and when you do evil- no matter what the motive- your soul is eroded. Well, my soul is less.”

“I am only mortal, desperate, urgent. Spirits have endless ages in which to do nothing, if they so choose, but humans have death to hurry them on. Near or far, the end is always in sight. We have no time to stand and stare. Make your choice, Fernanda.”

“You’d have to trust in Hope,” said Fern. “Is that it?”No,” Ragginbone replied shortly. “Hope needs something tangible to sustain it. You would have to rely on Faith. Only Faith can endure in the teeth of the evidence.”

“There was a long pause. “you know,” he went on, “I sometimes think mankind is dangerously arrogant. We do a few sums, and then claim we have the universe off pat. we measure the spaces between the stars, and declare them empty. We set a limit on infinity. We are like the occupants of a closed room; having worked out everything within the range of our knowledge, we announce that the room and its contents are all that exists. Nothing beyond. Nothing unseen or unknown, incalculable or neffable. This is it. And then every so often God lifts the veil—twitches the curtain—and gives us a glimpse, just a glimpse, of something more. As if He wishes to show us how narrow is our vision, how meaningless the boundaries we have set for ourselves. I felt that when Fern was talking. Just for a minute I though: This is truth, there’s a world beyond all the jargon of unbelief.”

“Once people needed heaven and hell, Elysium and Faerie. They believed. Belief is the great creative force, the faith that moves mountains. If Someone had not believed in us, so they say, we would never have been born. I have spent my darkest hours wondering what kind of a Creator would have believed in me." Kal”

“Advice is a dangerous thing," the Watcher responded. "It should be given only rarely and cautiously, and taken in small doses with skepticism.”

“Lougarry was waiting over the brow of the hill, lying so still in the grass that a butterfly had perched within an inch of her nose. The stems bent and shimmered as she rose to her feet, and the butterfly floated away like a wind-borne petal. Fern wondered if , like Ragginbone, the she-wolf possessed the faculty of making herself at one with her surroundings, not invisible but transmuted, so close to nature that she could blend with it at will and be absorbed into its many forms, becoming grass blade and wildflower, still earth and moving air, resuming her true self at the prompting of a thought. It came to Fern that we are all part of one vast pattern of Being, the real world and the shadow-world, sunlight and werelight, Man and spirit, and to understand and accept that was the first step toward the abnegation of ego, the affirmation of the soul. To comprehend the wind, not as a movement of molecules but as the pulse of the air, the pulse of her pulse, was to become the wind, to blow with it through the dancing grasses to the edge of the sky...”