“Only the ship is made of books, its sails thousands of overlapping pages, and the sea it floats upon is dark black ink.”

“they start in the ice garden, through the twins grow impatient with leisurely pace that celia prefers to take around the frozen trees. before they have traveled halfway through the space they are begging to ride the carousel instead.”

“I'm an emotional sort of person in general and I have a vivid imagination, so I feel the whole spectrum of emotion strongly when I write.”

“You don't have to be a chef or even a particularly good cook to experience proper kitchen alchemy: the moment when ingredients combine to form something more delectable than the sum of their parts. Fancy ingredients or recipes not required; simple, made-up things are usually even better.”

“When you meet someone new who instantly gets you, your sense of humor and your attitudes and your worldview, even if theirs are different - and you get them in return. You both talk and talk and agree and laugh and nod and yes, yes, of course you should get another round of drinks.”

“Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself.”

“It was all a matter of timing," she says. "My train was late that day. The day I saw you drop your notebook. Had it been on schedule we never would have met. Maybe we were never meant to. It was a possibility, one of thousands, and not inevitable, the way some things are.”

“Something about the circus stirs their souls, and they ache for it when it is absent.”

“The false face had been handsome, yes, but consciously so. As though he was too aware of his own attractivensss, something she found distinctly unappealing.”

“He turns and walks away, moving so quickly that the candle flames shiver with the motion of the air. “I miss you,” Isobel says as he leaves, but the sentiment is crushed by the clatter of the beaded curtain falling closed behind him.”

“Perhaps it is controlling the chaos within more than the chaos without.”