“No, it wasn't aging that made someone brittle, it was disappointment that did. It was allowing the world to make you smaller and smaller until you couldn't hold yourself upright anymore. That, that made a woman break.”

“The world the gods made is too big for us, so we make ourselves a smaller one.”

“I could have died right there, because the thought of living without someone you love is like a pair of giant hands pressing around your heart, making it smaller and smaller, until you are left with only a memory of warmth. It’s like when the sun comes through a window, moving across the room with each hour, until night falls and all you can do is try to remember the soothing shapes it made.”

“Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader.”

“There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.”

“Friends can make you feel that the world is smaller and less sneaky than it really is.”