“Then she marched to the pillows and beat them mercilessly until they lay puffed out like obedient clouds.”

“She didn't want to go far, just out of the trees so she could see the stars. They always eased her loneliness. She thought of them as beautiful creatures, burning and cold; each solitary, and bleak, and silent like her.”

“She would thump them both, and she would apologize to neither.”

“It seems better to me for a child to have these skills and never use them, than not have them and one day need them," she said.”

“She knew her nature. She would recognize it if she came face-to-face with it. It would be a blue-eyed green-eyed monster, wolflike and snarling. A vicious beast that struck out at friends in uncontrollable anger, a killer that offered itself as a vessel of the king's fury.But then it was a strange monster, for beneath its exterior it was frightened and sickened by its own violence. It chastised itself for its savagery. And sometimes it had no heart for violence and rebelled against it utterly. A monster that refused, sometimes, to behave like a monster. When a monster stopped behaving like a monster , did it stop being a monster? Did it become something else?Perhaps she wouldn't recognize her own nature after all.”

“She would like to restrain from cruelty and receive no admiration for it.”

“I think.' she said, 'that sometimes we don't feel the things that we are. But others can feel them.”