“We have what we can hold, dear boy, and never let them see you flinch or falter.”

“In my experience, milady, we can never get back to exactly where we started, no matter how hard we try.”

“Never do yourself, what you can con professionals into doing for you.”

“The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.”

“People give themselves to you, in their talking, and in other ways, if you are quiet and patient and let them, and not in such a damned rush to give yourself to them you go bat-blind and deaf.”

“If you can't do what you want, do what you can.”

“All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived. Or at all. After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed.”