Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

Being Jem, Tessa reflected, must be a great deal like being the owner of a thouroughbred dog that liked to bite your guests. You had to have a hand on his collar constantly.

Pardon me, but we did not have the time to exchange that kind of personal information," Magnus said. "I could not have known! Moreover, I wish to assure both of you that I did not make any amorous advances on female monkeys." he paused and winked. "I didn't actually see any, so I never got the chance.

She'd been impressed by his looks at first--those sharply planed cheekbones and those black, fathomless eyes--but his affable, sympathetic personality grated on her now. She didn't like boys who looked as if they never got mad about anything. In Isabelle's world, rage equaled passion equaled a good time.

One must look at the next step on the path ahead, rather than the mountain in the distance, or one would never reach one's goal.

The Brother's hood fell back, and his silvery hair shone out in the dim chamber like starlight. All the air rushed out of Tessa's lungs in a single instant. The Silent Brother was Jem.

Come with me," she said. "Stay with me. Be with me. See everything with me. I have traveled the world and seen so much, but there is so much more, and no one I would rather see it with than you. I would go everywhere and anywhere with you, Jem Carstairs.