“The powdered sugar had caramelized and blackened into a sucking tar pit in which my ladyfingers languished like so many sunk mastadons.”

“I hate the way bitterness is like a black, bubbling tar pit in me, and I hate the way so many memories of you are in that pit.”

“It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact.”

“Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants.”

“I should like to know if he has sunk a frigate, alone, with a Fleur-de-Nuit on his back; and as for distinction, my ancestors were scholars in China while his were starving in pits.”

“Morning. Strawberry sky dusted with white winter powder sugar sun. And nobody to munch on it with”