“I'm pretty sure lurking in a dark alley to mug me with your apology isn't the usual way to go about saying you're sorry. But I didn't read that Mars-Venus book, so who knows.”

“I'm going to use them to track him down and thwart him." "Thwart?" Sarissa asked."Thwart." I said. "To prevent someone from accomplishing something by means of visiting gratuitous violence upon his smarmy person.""I'm pretty sure that isn't the definition," Sarissa said."It is today.”

“Thwart," I said. "To prevent someone from accomplishing something by means of visiting gratuitous violence upon his smarmy person.""I'm pretty sure that isn't the definition." Sarissa said."It is today.”

“Technically,' I said, "I'm not breaking any of the Laws of Magic. I'm not robbing you of your will, so I'm clear of the Fourth Law. And you didn't get loose, so I'm clear of the Seventh Law. The Council can bite me.'The bone ridges above Chauncy's eyes twitched. 'Surely, that is merely a colorful euphemism, rather than a statement of desire.''It is.”

“She looked up at me with a polite smile, her dark hair long and appealing...I liked the smile. Maybe I didn't look like a beaten-up bum. Maybe on me it just looked ruggedly determined."I'm sorry, sir," she said, "but the addiction counseling center is on twenty-six." Sigh.”

“Or maybe this wasn't a human-faerie translation problem at all. Maybe this was a male-female translation problem. I read an article once that said that when women have a conversation, they're communicating on five levels. They follow the conversation that they're actually having, the conversation that is specifically being avoided, the tone being applied to the overt conversation, the buried conversation that is being covered only in subtext, and finally the other person's body language. That is, on many levels, astounding to me. I mean, that's like having a freaking superpower. When I, and most other people with a Y chromosome, have a conversation, we're having a conversation. Singular. We're paying attention to what is being said, considerating that, and replying to it. All these other conversations that have apparently been going on for the last several thousand years? I didn't even know tht they existed until I read that stupid article, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. I felt somewhat skeptical about the article's grounding. There were probably a lot of women who didn't communicate on multiple wavelenghts at once. There were probably men who could handle that many just fine. I just wasn't one of them. So, ladies, if you ever have some conversation with your boyfriend or husband or brother or male friend, and you are telling him something perfectly obvious, and he comes away from it utterly clueless? I know it's tempting to think to yourself, "The man can't possibly be that stupid!" But yes. Yes he can.”

“The only good thing about having your back to the wall is that it makes it really easy to choose which way you're going to go.”