“Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one's lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.”

“One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it - water stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave wants to make you be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.”

“Diggory's Dyke was a deep cut between two chalk downs-high, green hills, where a thin layer of green grass and reddish earth covered the chalk, and there was scarcely soil enough for trees. The Dyke looked, from a distance, like a white chalk gash on a green velvet board. Local legend had it that the cut was dug, in a day and a night, by one Diggory, using a spade that had once been a sword blade before Wayland Smith had melted it down and beaten it out, on his journey into Faerie from the Wall. There was those who said the sword had once been Flamberge, and others, that it was one the sword Balmung; but there was none who claimed to know just who Diggory had been, and it might all have been stuff and nonsense. Anyway, the path to Wall went through Diggory's Dyke, and any foot-traveler or any person going by any manner of wheeled vehicle went through the Dyke, where the chalk rose on either side of you like thick white walls, and the Downs rose up above them like green pillows of a giant's bed.”

“There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. ”

“When you die, they can make you into diamonds now. It’s scientific. That’s how I want to be remembered. I want to shine.”

“I was ten years old, and I was still playing conkers and knocking off sweet shops while she was sitting on the linoleum floor of her cell sawing at her wrists with a bit of broken glass she'd got from heaven-knows-were. Cut her fingers up, too, but she did it all right. They found her in the morning, sticky, red, and cold.”

“There,' said Wednesday, 'is one who "does not have the faith and will not have the fun". Chesterton. Pagan indeed. So. Shall we go out onto the street, Easter my dear, and repeat the exercise? Find out how many passers-by know that their Easter festival takes its name from Eostre of the Dawn? Let's see - I have it. We shall ask a hundred people. For every one that knows the truth, you may cut off one of my fingers, and when I run out of them, toes; for every twenty who don't know you spend a night making love to me. And the odds are certainly in your favour here - this is San Francisco, after all. There are heathens and pagans and Wiccans aplenty on these precipitous streets.”