“She had seen the almost-human Orona, who was orphaned and alone in the world, a woman whom Cain had plucked off the streets and fallen in love with. What she didn’t see was the undead creature Cain barely knew, the foolish human girl who fell in love with the caretaker of the seas. She hadn’t seen me stand up against a hurricane or keep a cave from crushing two lovers to death. She hadn’t seen me throw myself over the ones who would have turned to ashes when the volcano erupted, or made water appear from the sands to the dying in the desert. She did not know I was both savior and destroyer to so many souls.”

“Among all the other nights upon nights, the girl had spent that one on the boat….when it happened, the burst of Chopin…. There wasn’t a breath of wind and the music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable. And the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in her turn, throw herself in her turn into the sea, and afterwards, she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn’t sure she hadn’t loved him with a love she hadn’t seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in the sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music.”

“She had the power to destroy. I had only seen the power to love. When you discovered both, who could figure out what to do with that?”

“She looked at him and realized that she loved him, out of nowhere, pure and simple. She loved him: this boy who fit so naturally in the water, the wild, and in everything else. She loved him: this boy who seemed to grow up out of the ground itself. There was a part of her that had known this from the first time she had seen him. This was what love was: a landslide in your heart.”

“It was pretty late and the streets were quiet so she was almost sure no one had seen her drag the soul eater into the alley... where she cut his head off with a samurai sword. God, she loved her life.”

“She had seen what it cost him and her heart quickened with compassion. For that alone, she might have loved him almost.”