“Had she always been so insulated from human contact, like a bloom encased in frost?”

“It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact.”

“Mr. Grey had been told that the globes were swampfire, encased in a timeloop charm so they were inextinguishable.”

“Living as human being and as a divinity.moving from tension into relaxation,from relaxation into trance,from trance into a more intense contact with other people.from that contact back into tension and so on,Like The Serpent swallowing its own tail.”

“if she thought she'd seen his eyes burn before, it was nothing compared to what they were doing now. Frost had never been so hot.”

“She had no idea, really, what it meant to see a man's arm ripped out by the root, to see a head torn off a neck. She had no idea. We human beings live perpetually insulated from the horrors that happen all around us. No matter what she'd suffered, she had not witnessed the vicious ugliness of that kind of death. No, it had to be unreal to her, even Laura who had endured so much.”