“If only others knew that Lady Calpurnia Hartwell, proper, well-behaved spinster, entertained deep-seated and certainly unladylike thoughts about fictional heroes.”

“Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.”

“Heroes, notwithstanding the high ideas which, by the means of flatterers, they may entertain of themselves, or the world may conceive of them, have certainly more of mortal than divine about them.”

“We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.”

“That was other thing I hated about kids; they always said the exact things that deep down you already knew, would never admit, and most certainly never wanted to hear.”

“There are no heroes on the battlefield, my lady; there are only survivors.”