“Peaches and Cheese”:The vagabond sun winks down through the trees,While lilacs, like memories, waft on the breeze,My friend, I was born for days such as these,To inhale perfume,And cut through the gloom,And feast like a king upon peaches and cheese!I’ll travel this wide world and go where I please,Can’t stop my wand’ring, it’s like a disease.My only regret as I cross the high seas:What I leave behind,Though I hope to find,My own golden city of peaches and cheese!”

“I rose to standing, like Lars upon the barbican, the dark city spread at my feet. Lights twinkled in tavern windows, bobbed at the Wolfstoot Bridge construction. Once I had been suspended over this vast space, hanging and helpless, at a dragon’s mercy. Once I had feared that telling the truth would be like falling, that love would be like hitting the ground, but here I was, my feet firmly planted, standing on my own. We were all monsters and bastards, and we were all beautiful.”

“Please, Orma, I’ve already gotten you in so much trouble—” “That I can’t possibly get into more. Take it.” He wouldn’t stop glaring at me until I’d put the earring back on its cord. “You are all that’s left of Linn. Her own people won’t even say her name. I—I value your continued existence.” I could not speak; he had pierced me to my very heart.”

“Keeping my smile raised like a shield between us, I curtsied and quit the room.”

“I angle my head down and peer up at him through my lashes in what I hope is an alluring manner. I have zero experience in this area though, so it’s possible I look like a total moron.”

“Always I hev my fists and my war pipes!”

“...it's as if I have just solved Skivver's predictive equations, or even better, as if I have intuited the One Equation, seen the numbers behind the moon and the stars, behind mountains and history, art and death and yearning, as if my comprehension is large enough that it can encompass universes, from the beginning to the end of time.”