“Slim cunning hands at rest, and cozening eyes,Under this stone one loved too wildly lies;How false she was, no granite could declare;Nor all earth's flowers, how fair.”

“Kizzy was so busy wishing she was Sarah Ferris or Jenny Glass that she could scarcely see herself at all and she was certainly blind to her own weird beauty: her heavy spell-casting eyes too-wide mouth wild hair and hips that could be wild too if they learned how. No one else in town looked anything like her and if she lived to womanhood she was the one artists would want to draw not the Sarahs and Jennys. She was the one who would some day know a dozen ways to wear a silk scarf how to read the sky for rain and coax feral animals near how to purr throaty love songs in Portuguese and Basque how to lay a vampire to rest how to light a cigar how to light a man's imagination on fire.”

“O me, what eyes hath Love put in my head,Which have no correspondence with true sight!...Or, if they have, where is my judgment fled,That censures falsely what they see aright?If that be fair whereon my false eyes dote,What means the world to say it is not so?If it be not, then love doth well denoteLove's eye is not so true as all men's 'No.'How can it? O, how can Love's eye be true,That is so vex'd with watching and with tears? No marvel then, though I mistake my view;The sun itself sees not till heaven clears.O cunning Love! with tears thou keep'st me blind,Lest eyes well-seeing thy foul faults should find. - Shakespeare's Sonnet 148”

“Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. Gently gently. On. Careful.”

“And Winterfell … grey granite, oak and iron, crows wheeling around the towers, steam rising off the hot pools in the godswood, the stone kings sitting on their thrones … how could Winterfell be gone?”

“All I could think about while driving after you was how it was about to happen all over again and that I would never be able to feel your warm skin under my hands or look into your beautiful blue eyes, or tell you how much I love you.”