“She'd heard the word before; seraphim were some high order of angels, at least according to the Christian mythos, for which Brimstone had utter contempt, as he did for all religion. 'Humans have gotten glimpses of things over time,' he'd said. 'Just enough to make the rest up. It's all a quilt of fairy tales with a patch here and there of truth.”

“It's all a quilt of fairy tales with a patch here and there of truth.”

“He used to talk to me about Russia all the time and had sworn up and down that I'd love it here. "To you, it'd be like a fairy tale," he'd told me."Sorry, comrade. Borg and out-of-date music aren't part of any happy ending I've ever imagined.""Borscht, not borg. And I've seen your appetite. If you were hungry enough, you'd eat it." "So starvation's necessary for this fairy tale to work out?”

“All fairy tales, Tolkien argued, echo the gospel of Jesus Christ in some way because the gospel is the True Story; it’s the real fairy tale that crashed into the time line of history... ‘The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact,’ Lewis wrote”

“There must be possible a fiction which,leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.”

“September knew a number of curse words, most of which she heard the girls at school saying in the bathrooms, in hushed voices, as if the words could make things happen just by being spoken, as if they were fairy words, and had to be handled just so.”