“Be a peg, hammered into the frozen ground, immovable.”

“Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you're destroying the peg.”

“Flea-Market vendors are frozen mid-haggle. Middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying.”

“But fear is confusing. It tears you in two. Half of you wants to run far, far away, but the other half is paralyzed, frozen, immovable. And the hard part is that you never know which half is going to win.”

“The words from The Microlight Pilot’s Handbook hammered in my temples. ‘It is better to be on the ground wishing to God you were in the air, than in the air wishing to God you were on the ground.”

“I left it with a warmer,” he said drily. Because war mages ate their fried chicken frozen to the ground and they liked it.”