“What she said was something about trusting that everything, no matter how horrible it might seem at the moment, ultimately turns out to be a blessing.”

“How horrible it is to have so many people killed! And what a blessing that one cares for none of them! ”

“It said something about how much the soul or spirit in charge mattered.”

“You'd have thought that after suffering such a loss nothing else would matter to her but that didn't seem to be how it worked. She was fearful about everything now. It was as if she had finally seen the awful power of fate, it's deviousness, the way it could wipe out in an instant the one thing you had been certain you could rely on, and now she was constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to work out where the next blow might fall.”

“Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy.”

“She was on a real, grown-up adventure, no matter how badly it should turn out.”