He had never realized, while Elspeth was alive, the extent to which a thing had not completely happened until he told her about it.

I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark.

Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.

The cure might be worse than the problem

There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina's first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you've misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.

But you know: you know that if I could have stayed, if I could have gone on, that I would have clutched every second: whatever it was, this death, you know that it came and took me, like a child carried away by goblins.

But you make me happy. It's living up to being happy that's the difficult part.