“The three girls were sitting and lying beside her, holding one another, weeping, their arms and legs and hair tangled like the roots of close trees, sobs shaking them like leaves in a high wind.”

“I walk down the steps of the verandah towards her and with shaking hands she holds my face between them, sobbing, "Look at my beautiful girl.”

“it is the way that all girls who only know one boy move. Centered as if the love that boy feels for them anchors them deep as a tree's roots, holds them still as the oaks, which don't uproot in hurricane wind. Love as certainty.”

“Winds shake the leaves and for a moment I smell smoke. I concentrate on the scent, but it vanishes into the aroma of rain and tree bark, the way one life can collapse into another and different people can stir within the same body, like bats thrashing inside a secret hollow.”

“It was a woman's voice, high and sweet, with a strange music in it like none that he had ever heard and a sadness that he thought might break his heart. Bran squinted, to see her better. It was a girl, but smaller than Arya, her skin dappled like a doe's beneath a cloak of leaves. Her eyes were queer--large and liquid, gold and green, slitted like a cat's eyes. No one has eyes like that. Her hair was a tangle of brown and red and gold, autumn colors, with vines and twigs and withered flowers woven through it. "Who are you?" Meera Reed was asking.Bran knew. "She's a child. A child of the forest.”

“Her fingers were gnarled and crooked like the roots of the oldest swamp trees. Not prissy roots of trees that grew in manicured parks and didn't understand the mess of life. These were roots forced to grow around, and down, and through, to survive.”