“A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.”

“You mustn't wait for someone to rescue you, . . . . A girl expecting rescue never learns to rescue herself. Even with the means, she'll find her courage wanting.”

“Cassandra's grandmother smiled then, only it wasn't a happy smile. Cassandra thought she knew how it felt to smile like that. She often did so herself when her mother promised her something she really wanted but knew might not happen.”

“The certainty that she would find what it was she sought just slipped away, until one night she knew there was nothing, no one waiting for her. That no matter how far she walked, how carefully she searched, how much she wanted to find the person she was looking for, she was alone" - The Forgotten Garden”

“She was a bookish person who'd never been exposed to books: she was gifted with astute powers of observation, but her thoughts and feelings weren't filtered through those that she'd read, those that had been written before. She had a unique way of seeing the world and a manner of expressing herself that caught Juniper unawares and made her laugh and think and feel things anew.”

“People marveled at her ability to build characters from the inside out, to submerge herself and disappear beneath the skin of another person, but there was no trick to it; she merely bothered to learn the character's secrets. Laurel knew quite a bit about keeping secrets. She also knew that was where the real people were found, hiding behind their black spots.”

“Cassandra always hid when she read, though she never quite knew why. It was as if she couldn't shake the guilty suspicion that she was being lazy, that surrendering herself so completely to something so enjoyable must surely be wrong. But surrender she did. Let herself drop through the rabbit hole and into a tale of magic and mystery ...”