I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.

She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.

But if you must be clever, then be clever. Be brave. Sleep with fists closed and shoot straight.

I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together. But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

The smell of loving is a difficult one to describe, but if you think of the times when someone has held you close and made you safe, you will remember how it smells just as well as I do.

There is no such thing as a people who are all wicked or even all good. Everyone chooses. But even they, even they looked at people and saw only tools. No one is a cup for another to drink from.

Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.