September had never been betrayed before. She did not even know what to call the feeling in her chest, so bitter and sour. Poor child. There is always a first time, and it is never the last time.

In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.

Monsters almost always are culture's way of working out their fears.

But the thought arrived inside her like a train: Marya Morevna, all in black, here and now, was a point at which all the women she had been met—the Yaichkan and the Leningrader and the chyerti maiden; the girl who saw the birds, and the girl who never did—the woman she was and the woman she might have been and the woman she would always be, forever intersecting and colliding, a thousand birds falling from a thousand oaks, over and over.

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.

Bad luck relies on absolutely perfect timing.

Most of them... most of us never figure it out. Bad dream, they think, or good one. Funny rash, never really goes away, but Doc says it's fine, nothing to worry about. Why dwell on it? But some people, they just can't let it go... Some people drink themselves out of school trying to find it again, trolling through bars where the shadows are so greasy they leave trails on the walls, just to find a way in, a way through. Some people forget too that you're supposed to stop sleeping, you're supposed to have a life in the sun.