We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.

I perceive that you have a cruel heart, my child. It lies within your breast like a smoldering blade, hissing steam at me.

It’s been me all along,” said September slowly. “Me who gave up my shadow, me who went down into Fairyland-Below and Fairyland-Lower-Than-That to wake up the Prince. Me who shot the poor Minotaur. You oughtn’t just hand the whole business over the moment a Prince comes on the scene. I’ve got to see it through, don’t you see? The Hollow Queen is hollow because she’s missing the part of her that’s me. We’ve got to come together again. And he can’t do a thing about that.

That’s what happens to friends, eventually. They leave you. It’s practically what they’re for.

I believe we have an utterly unique specimen on our hands: a child who listens.

It's Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it.

Fairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons.