“Both carried, despite their martial postures, an aura of sorrow, though ghosts of smiles flickered across their faces. They would have recognized one another from a mere turn of the head observed from hundreds of yards away on a moonless night in January.”

“How women defeat one another; how need defeats women.”

“In some ways I liked the struggle better, I think. It clarified what was important.”

“Why is it that voices break hearts?”

“For all the things we say to our children for their own good, very little good ever comes of it.”

“Imagine if we were capable of a form of empathy that lets us know one another by savoring the aura we leave on the things we have touched. We would go to a dump to get drunk on one another's souls.”

“To be the child of a conficted or reputed witch was inherently dangerous; in one pathetic case in Lorraine a young couple were both accused, and it emerged that they had decided to marry after attending an execution at the stake of their respective parents, 'so that they would have nothing to reproach one another with.”