“Silence is not just about secrecy, Your Majesty. It is grief and it is shame.”

“Strength isn't about bearing a cross of grief or shame. Strength comes from choosing your own path, and living with the consequences.”

“Yr had a region called the Fear-bog. Lactamaeon had taken her there once to see the monsters and corpses of her nightmares accumulating there from year after year of terrifying dreams. They had swum through the almost solid ground.She had said, What is that awful stench?Shame and secrecy, Bird-one, shame and secrecy, he had answered.”

“There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower's lonely bedroom.”

“I had a feeling of shame about my grief, as if I was making false amends for the bitterness I felt towards him when he was alive.”

“My feelings for you shame me into silence.”