“The world is one unending chess match, my dear, and I am the one playing it how I please. I poke and prod to move my pieces to places I find desirable. And the defiant ones who resist me I simply remove from the board." He pulled up his right sleeve, showing Laura a sheathed dagger strapped to his arm. "But you, Laura, are not of this chess match at all. You walked unexpectedly onto my board, scattering my pieces out of the way, the ones that I had worked on so tirelessly to arrange to perfection.”

“Oh, fine.' Rochelle sprinkled some water over one of the glowstones and laid the object down in the center of their tiny camp. 'I didn't know you were afraid of the dark.''It isn't the dark I'm afraid of. It's the things hiding in the dark that I can't see.' Laura closed her eyes. 'Like ninjas.”

“You broke a man today. Doesn't that affect you at all? These are lives, not pieces in a chess game with your uncle.' 'You're wrong. We are on my uncle's board and these men are all his pieces.' 'Then each time you move one of them, you can congratulate yourself on how much like him you are.”

“There are people who hate the truth. It is a poison to them. The only way to protect themselves from the poison is to eliminate those who bring it.”

“I learned to pick up each piece, one at a time, from my pile of potential matches and try to fit it from any angle into the socket, then discard it and move on. Each failure is meaningless. It's not me, it's the pieces, and I have to, absolutely must, try each and every piece every possible way until I find one that fits. They aren't failures, they're steps, small bits of progress.”

“I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.”

“The queen was my favorite chess piece. Unlike the women I knew in real life, she was powerful. Her job was to defend her husband at all costs, because while he was weak and practically defenseless—only allowed to move one square at a time—she was the strongest player on the board, hindered by no restrictions at all.”