They are beautiful monsters... And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty.

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how "important" it is?

I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the wikt:happily ever after|happily ever after was so damnably much work.

The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices they made were real. They mattered.

He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them.

Only a fool can't be fooled.

She thinks she's kept me. She would have kept me better if she had let me go now.

I will love you forever, he thought. I am lying, he thought, and this time he was right.

He was growing up. Soon he would be a man. He wondered what that would mean. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. There could not be more.