"This was the power of the story weaver, Nell realized. An ability to conjure color so that all else seemed to fade."
"Some seasons later, the Princess of the kingdom was riding with her handmaiden on the edge of the dark woods. Though once she had been very ill, the Princess had recovered miraculously and was now married to a fine prince. She lived a full and happy life: walked and danced and sang, and enjoyed all the vast riches of health. They had a dear baby girl who was much loved and ate pure honey and drank the dew from rose petals and had beautiful butterflies for playthings."
"Because desperate people cling to hope like sailors to their wreaks."
"Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?"
"But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's."
"She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation."
"She'd slept terribly the night before. The room, the bed, were both comfortable enough, but she'd been plagued with strange dreams, the sort that lingered upon waking but slithered away from memory as she tried to grasp them. Only the tendrils of discomfort remained."
"What she really felt like doing was reading. Escaping into the Enchanted Wood, up the Faraway Tree, or with the Famous Five into Smuggler's Top."
"Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so - to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!"
"That was the nature of history, of course: notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors."
"Every so often a reader tells me, somewhat disappointedly, that their family doesn't have any secrets. To which I always reply that of course it does, they just don't know them yet. For where there are people living in close proximity, there will always be secrets."
"To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness."
"Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?"
"You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing."
"As Linus grew into his teens, became even more awkward, with long, gangly arms and odd ginger hairs sprouting from his spotty chin, Georgiana blossomed into a beautiful child, beloved of all on the estate. She brought a smile to the face of even the most hardened tenants, farmers who hadn't had a kind word for the Montrachet family in years would send baskets of apples to the kitchen for Miss Georgiana to enjoy."
"How was a boy who'd tasted poverty ever expected to choose the poorer road?"
"As the boat drew nearer to shore, and tiny dots in the distance became seagulls, she opened the book across her lap and gazed at the beautiful black-and-white sketch of a woman and a deer side by side in the clearing of a thorny forest. And somehow, though she could not read the words, the little girl realized the she knew this picture's tale. Of a young princess who traveled a great distance across the sea to find a precious, hidden item belonging to someone she dearly loved."
"The simplest falsehoods are the strongest."
"Then he led her to sit by him on a fallen gum trunk, smooth and white, and he leaned to whisper in her ear. Transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen years. Waited for the flicker of recognition, the minute shift in expression as she registered what he was telling her. Watched as the bottom fell out of her world and the person she had been vanished in an instant."
"His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story."
"The prospect of an early death sits differently upon each person. In some it gifts maturity far outweighing their age and experience: calm acceptance blossoms into a beautiful nature and soft countenance. In others, however, it leads to the formation of a tiny ice flint in their heart. Ice that, though at times concealed, never properly melts.Rose, though she would have liked to be one of the former, knew herself deep down to be one of the latter."
"Loneliness had made the Queen bitter, bitterness had made her selfish, and selfishness had made her suspicious. --The Changeling"
"The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself."
"Winter passed, and the world around began to wake. The birds returned to the kingdom and set about readying their nests, deer could be seen once more grazing where the fields met the woods, and buds burst forth upon the branches of the kingdom's trees."
"You'll beat this. I know it doesn't feel like it, but you will. You're a survivor.""I don't want to survive it.""I know that, too," Nell had said. "And it's fair enough. But sometimes we don't have a choice..."