For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.

Surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things.

The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.

Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?

If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.

It means that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still that she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and darkness before Time began, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and death itself would work backwards.