“She had beaten the horse and the horse had kicked her in the tits, where it hurt.”

“I had been riding horses before my memory kicked in, so my life with horses had no beginning. It simply appeared from the fog of infancy. I survived a difficult childhood by traveling on the backs of horses, and in adulthood the pattern didn't change.”

“Her book was filled with centaurs because she had not fully grasped the complexity of actual people, actual horses.”

“He was waiting there for her beside the pool - a great black horse with shoulders like polished ebony and the water still streaming from his mane and tail. Morag stood and looked at him for a long moment. The great horse looked at her and never moved.“Will you trust me?” he had asked her the evening before, and she had trusted him then. She trusted him now, and so she walked towards him. She grasped his mane, and still the black horse never moved. She stood on a stone beside him, swung herself onto his back, and the black horse moved.”

“Gertrudis got on her horse and rode away. She wasn't riding alone--she carried her childhood beside her, in the cream fritters she had enclosed in a jar in her saddlebag”

“But what about the horses? Have they always had horses here?""Probably. Colonial words usually have horses; they're cheap local transportation,self-replicating.”