“It is queer, but my love and longing for the world are always deepened by my absence from it; it's wondrous, don't you think, that a person can swing from despair to gleeful hunger, and that even during these dark days there is happiness to be found in the smallest things?”

“Life'd be a lot easier if it were like a fairy tale," said Cassandra, "if people belonged to stock character types.""Oh, but people do, they only think they don't. Even the person who insists such things don't exist is a cliché: the dreary pedant who insists on his own uniqueness!”

“She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.”

“True love, it's like an illness. I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things. Now I do. It's an illness. You can catch it when you least expect. There's no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it's fatal.”

“Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.”

“It's a funny thing, character, the way it brands people as they age, rising from within to leave its scar.”

“The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.”