I do not tolerate a world emptied of you. I have tried. For a year I have called every black tree Marya Morevna; I have looked for your face in the patterns of the ice. In the dark, I have pored over the loss of you like pale gold.

Everybody's strange everywhere. Most of the trick of being a social animal is pretending you're not. But who do you fool? Nobody worth talking to.

Her father’s shadow looked sadly down at her. “You can never forget what you do in a war, September my love. No one can. You won’t forget your war either.

She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like death.

September could see it. She did not know what is was she saw. That is the disadvantage of being a heroine, rather than a narrator. She knew only that a red light glowed and went dark, glowed and went dark.

You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews.

Every morning is a battle between the superego and the id, and I am a mere foot soldier with mud and a snooze button on her shield.