“...Your body is nothing but an envelope, Karou. Your soul is another matter, and is not, as far as I know, in any immediate danger." "An envelope?" She didn't like to think of her body as an envelope--something others might be able to open up and rifle through, remove things from like so many clipped coupons. "I assumed you felt the same way," he'd said. "The way you scribble on it." Brimstone didn't approve of her tattoos, which was funny, since he was responsible for her first, the eyes on her palms.”

“It didn't escape Karou's notice that he found subtle ways of touching her.”

“So," he called to her back, "Just out of curiosity, you know, purely conversation and all, at what age will you be entertaining offers of marriage?""You think it'll be so easy?" she called back over her shoulder. "No way. There will be tasks. Like in a fairy tale.""Sounds dangerous.""Very, so think twice.""No need," he said. "You're worth it.”

“Do you think it's over now, though? That he's through with me?""One way you could make sure," said Chiro. She was glib, jesting - surely - but her eyes were bright. "You could die," she said. "Resurrect ugly. He'd leave you alone then.”

“Was there another life she was meant to be living? At times she felt a keen certainty that there was ― a phantom life, taunting her from just out of reach. A sense would come over her while she was drawing or walking, and once while she was dancing slow and close with Kaz, that she was supposed to be doing something else with her hands, with her legs, with her body. Something else. Something else. Something else.”

“Kizzy wanted it all so bad her soul leaned half out of her body hungering after it, and that was what drove the goblins wild, her soul hanging out there like an untucked shirt.”

“And yet, something tied them together, strong than any of that, something with the power to conduct her blood and breath like a symphony, so that anything she did to fight against it felt like discord, like disharmony with her self.”