"Once upon a time, there was a girl as cunning as the fox in winter, as hungry as the wolf at first frost, and as cold as the icy wind that kept them at each other's throats."

"If a young lady did not wish to be murdered, it was advisable that she not spend her evenings meeting with strangers on dark street corners."

"Strange, the powers you find sometimes, in a garden at the end of the road."

"If there's a way into hell, someone will always find it."

"When you have had every freedom pared from you, you learn to hoard the manner and time and method of your death: it becomes the only thing that is really yours."

"I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left."

"I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones."

"People are often frightened by the night, but it is in daylight where the real monsters hide. They wear smiles, and they are loved—or else, believed. Those are the most dangerous."

"When history fails to shed light on the truth, myth creates its own."

"I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you."

"My mother may be too weak to protect herself, and my sister too young. But I'm neither of those things."

"It was the power of compulsive creation. The power of gods. Such a shame, she thought, that the only way he could access it was through pain and anguish."

"Her heart turned itself inside out, read aloud the writing in red on her arteries and valves, told her pointedly that love was never wholly the grand battles and explosive deeds."

"Regret would always clothe her in a heavy shroud, change the way she moved and the way she met the world. But so too did love. And it was warmer, thicker."

"Broken things called to broken things, tried to slot their shards together in the hopes that they would fit."