“His wife's a brand of Christian that forbids a gathering that involves young women dancing in the streets but not races where men die”

“This Skarmouth is raw and hungry, striving and unknowable. Everything the races make me feel on the inside is bleeding up through the seams of the street tonight.”

“Joseph Beringer...dances around behind me singing some poorly rhymed and slightly dirty song about my [racing] odds at my skirts.'I don't even wear skirts,' I snap at him.'Especially,' he says, 'in my daydreams.”

“We dance, we dance. You hold the thread of my soul. You spin, you spin. And you unravel the part from the whole. We laugh, we laugh. I'm so far from where I began. I fall, I fall. And I forget that I am.-from Golden Tongue:The Poems of Steven Slaughter”

“This summer-sweet night is only one minute upon one minute upon anotherBeautiful cacophony, sugar upon lips, dancing to exhaustionI thought of you, before this minute upon another minute upon anotherUntil, numb, my lips fell onto the mouth of another, and I was undone.~from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter which is a fictional book in Ballad: A gathering of faerie”

“He was not as soft as when I'd first met him, not as young, but the angles of his face, his quick gestures, the way he sucked in his lower lip to think before going on - I was in love with all of it.”

“Self-confidence is not the same thing as ego. This is not to say that the two don’t (frequently) dance hand in hand down the street, pushing over old ladies in crosswalks and kicking baby kittens. But they are definitely not the same entity. Ego is thinking you have all the answers. Self-confidence is knowing you don’t have the answers, but being pretty sure that you will be able to find them.”