“If my father discovered my secret, that for some time now I have been foiling his efforts to have the hart, I would lose my thumbs indeed, son or no," he said. "But it is cold, and I would have my clothes back.”

“You have no dower," he said. "Live, Keturah. Go home.""But I do have a dower," I said plainly. "This is my dower, Lord Death; the crown of flowers I will never wear at my wedding."He knelt on one knee before me."The little house I would have had of my own, to furnish and clean. That, too, is part of my dower.""I will give you the world for your footstool," he said."And most precious of all, I give you the wee baby I will never hold in my arms.”

“Had I truly thought I would not die when he kissed me? But I did. For a moment the breath and life went out of me and there was no time and no tomorrow but only my lips against his.”

“How thin the air felt at the forest's edge, how ghostly the trees that guarded their realm.... The whole world seemed as delicate as a dandelion seed, and as fleeting.... How sad to know that the figment village of my imagination would not vanish when I ended, to understand that it was not I who had invented the moon the first time I realized how lovely it was. To admit that it was not my breath that made the winds blow.... [M]y heart, my heart knew that when I closed my eyes I invented the night sky and the stars too. Wasn't the whole dome of the sky the same shape as the inside of my skull? Didn't I create the sun and the day when I raised my eyelids every morning?”

“My lord, why do you trouble me by walking with me in the dark? It is cruel.""I think to protect you from them," he said.”

“I was halfway between my home and the cookhouse when a mist of cloud began to creep across the early-risen moon. It darkened the ground enough that I did not see a small depression, and I stumbled. Immedietly I was steadied by some force I could not see, and then, as if the coming night clotted into a visible personage, I perceived that Lord Death was beside me.”

“And so he did his endless work,' I continued quietly, 'without feeling, without pity, without rest, for to open his heart to these would be to open his heart to his loneliness and longing and that was beyond bearing.”