“Oh, Grey, no one really likes keeping secrets. The only thing that makes a secret fun is knowing that you weren't supposed to tell it.”

“For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.”

“That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.”

“It hardly needs to be said: sooner or later secrets have a way of making themselves known.”

“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.”

“I am not a storyteller . . . not like the others. I only have one tale to tell.”

“Free as a bird' was the expression, and yet they weren't free at all, not as far as Saffy could tell: they were bound to one another by their habits, their seasonal needs, their biology, their nature, their birth. No freer than anyone else. Still, they knew the exhilaration of flight.”