But this is a story, and in a story there is always someone beautiful enough." - 'The Girl with Two Skins' from A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects

She did not want to read this book from start to finish, or rather, she thought perhaps it did not want her to. Instead she practiced the art of bibliomancy, trusting the book to show her what it wanted her to know.

Death stands behind every bride, every groom.

Whenever one does extraordinary things, someone is bound to try to repeat them for themselves. It's the way of the world.

Because I’m a cat. A big one, the Panther of Rough Storms, in fact. But still a cat. If there’s a saucer of milk to spill, I’d rather spill it than let it lie. If my mistress grows absent-minded and leaves a ball of yarn about, I’ll bat it between my paws, and unravel it. Because it’s fun. Because it’s what cats do best.

When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.

He tried to reconstruct the story in his mind, but it kept getting confused, bleeding into itself like watercolors.