“You know about witches, wizards. You can envision dragons, even if you presently think you are above believing in them. You doubt magic, but you have a word for it. Isn't that a strangeness that wears at you? All these things that you know all about, but you think you are above. Did you used to be able to shape the spell children use to find lost things in the grass? Did you always know to look at the sky, at stars, when you make your wishes? Who taught you the things your soul has always known?”

“Being a novelist is not the sort of thing we can shut off. It infests every bit of us until we lose the boundary between Person and Writer, like one of those color charts where it is impossible to say where the blue stops and the red begins.”

“I think it simply comes down to fantasy being the language I speak. While I cannot get into epic sword and sorcery, I see the world as having the potential to be slightly off-kilter. I have run into people who do not quite seem human – though of course they are – and have been privy to coincidences that almost make me believe in magic. Fantasy is sometimes just asking yourself, “Well, what if you are wrong? What if the world doesn’t work the way you think? What would that mean?”

“As long as she persisted in her belief that bafflement justified her actions, she felt confident no one would contradict her.”

“A lonely person on a college campus is never more than a few minutes and a bad decision from company.”

“Being certain one is alive isn't something to which one pays mind. If you could ask the question, you were fine. If you could not, hopefully you had a cozy coffin.”

“Like the discovery of most things - love and religion especially - she maintained the child's arrogant wonder than no one had understood it before her and, even if they had, they could not embrace it as passionately as she.”

“Reason had no place to crash once Emotion came to town.”

“I missed you,” she cried into him. Standing on top of the snow gave him an additional few inches on her and she rested her head against his chest. She could hear nothing within, just her own heartbeat echoing.”

“Keep to the 'I-statements' and discuss your feelings, she lectured herself. I think, I feel. Don't be accusatory. Don't tell him that he is an insecure prick who should back off before you deck him. Instead, say, 'I feel you are acting like an insecure prick who should back off before I deck you.”

“In the pause that followed, Shane understood why people said their hearts broke. She always thought it was a weak metaphor of strong emotion. She could feel each bit of shrapnel from her heart stab at her stomach and lungs. Her knees gave out beneath her as she heard the voice tell her what she already knew in her fragments of cardiac tissue.”