“I frowned, wondering if Trent would mind being the size of a fairy for a day. He could talk to the newest tenants in his garden.”

“Trent has kept his promise. He makes me smile every day.”

“Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less then normal size – the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, lockkeepers's lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children's bothy in the garden – are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice in the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.”

“he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. ...He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.”

“Trent was positively smug. Showing me his back, he rifled through a rack of earth charms and watched his hair shift color. “And whereas I might otherwise object—” “Bairn did the investigation on your parents’ deaths,” I interrupted, thoughts scrambling. “And my dad’s.” Bairn is supposed to be dead. Why is he across the road pretending to be a kind old man named Keasley? And how did Trent know who he was? His hair now an authoritative gray, Trent frowned. “And whereas I might otherwise object,” he tried again, “Quen assures me that between Bairn and two pixies—” “Two!” I blurted. “Jih took a husband?”“Damn it, Rachel, will you shut up!”

“To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that's on their minds, even before it's on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a Walkman so what's going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn't much like being talked at; he can't conceal how easily he gets bored.”