"Do you remember all of your audiences?" Marco asks. "Not all of them," Celia says. "But I remember the people who look at me the way you do.""What way might that be?""As though they cannot decide if they are afraid of me or they want to kiss me."" I am not afraid of you," Marco says."
"Celia, wait,” Marco says, standing but not moving closer to her. “You are breaking my heart. You told me once that I reminded you of your father. That you never wanted to suffer the way your mother did for him, but you are doing exactly that to me. You keep leaving me. You leave me longing for you again and again when I would give anything for you to stay, and it is killing me.” “It has to kill one of us,” Celia says quietly."
"If she were gone I would be nothing. You should think better of yourself than to settle for that."
"Love is fickle and fleeting," Tsukiko continues. "It is rarely a solid foundation for decisions to be made upon, in any game."
"It is a matter of perspective, the difference between opponent and partner," Tsukiko says. "You step to the side and the same person can be either or both or something else entirely. It is difficult to know which face is true."
"She turns her head, Bailey catches her eye, and she smiles at him. Not in the way that one smiles at a random member of the audience when one is in the middle of performing circus tricks with unusually talented kittens but in the way that one smiles when one recognizes someone they have not seen in some time."
"Follow your dreams Bailey. Be they Harvard or somehing else entirely. No matter what that father of yours says, or how loudly he might say it. He forgets that he was someone's dream once, himself"
"But you built me dreams instead..."
"I have spent a great deal of my life struggling to keep myself in control. To know myself inside and out, everything In perfect order. I lose that when I'm with you. That frightens me, and it frightens me how much I like it. How tempting it is to lose myself in you. To let it go. To let you save me from breaking chandeliers rather than constantly worrying about it, myself."
"You believe you could not live with the pain. Such pain is not lived with. It is only endured. I am sorry."
"Grow up, Bailey.""That is precisely what I'm doing," Bailey says. "I don't care if you don't understand that. Staying here won't make me happy. It will make you happy because you're insipid and boring, and an insipid, boring life is enough for you. It's not enough for me. It will never be enough for me. So I'm leaving. Do me a favor and marry someone who will take decent care of the sheep."
"This is, in part, why there is less magic in the world today. Magic is secret and secrets are magic, after all, and years upon years of teaching and sharing magic and worse. Writing it down in fancy books that get all dusty with age has lessened it, removed its power bit by bit."
"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."
"Prospero the Enchanter's immediate reaction upon meeting his daughter is a simple declaration of: "Well, fuck."
"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."
"The future is never set in stone."
"There is the softest of sobbing as the coffin is lowered into the ground, but it is difficult to pinpoint who it is coming from, or if it is instead a collective sound of mingled sighs and wind and shifting feet."
"Memories begin to creep forward from hidden corners of your mind. Passing disappointments. Lost chances and lost causes. Heartbreaks and pain and desolate, horrible loneliness. Sorrows you thought long forgotten mingle with still-fresh wounds."
"They seek each other out, these people of such specific like mind. They tell of how they found the circus, how those first few steps were like magic."
"You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is a dream."
"That's the beauty of it. Have you seen the contraptions these magicians build to accomplish the most mundane feats? They are a bunch of fish covered in feathers trying to convince the public they can fly, I am simply a bird in their midst."
"Widge can see the past." Poppet says suddenly. "That's why his stories are so good." "The past is easier," Widget says. "It's already there.""In the stars?" Bailey asks."No." Widget says. "On people. The past stays on you the way powdered sugar stays on fingers. Some people can get rid of it but it's still there, the events and t hings that pushed you to where you are now."
"I tried to explain as much as I could," Poppet says. "I think I made an analogy about cake.""Well, that must have worked," Widget says. "Who doesn't like a good cake analogy?"
"I mean only that I hope they find darkness or paradise without fear of it, if they can."
"And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister's story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead."