Don't start brooding about that, too," she says. "Everybody's got a piece of stranger inside them. It's what lets us surprise ourselves and keeps things interesting." -Lupita

I don't think the world is the way we like to think it is. I don't think it's one solid world, but many, thousands upon thousands of them--as many as there are people--because each person perceives the world in his or her own way; each lives in his or her own world. Sometimes they connect, for a moment, or more rarely, for a lifetime, but mostly we are alone, each living in our own world, suffering our small deaths.

Often the magical elements in my books are standing in for elements of the real world, the small and magical-in-their-own-right sorts of things that we take for granted and no longer pay attention to, like the bonds of friendship that entwine our own lives with those of other people and places.

Under the skin, intense fires burn.

The moon likes secrets," Meran said. "And secret things. She lets mysteries bleed into her shadows and leaves us to ask whether they originated from otherworlds, or from our own imaginations.

There are as many stories to be told as there are people to tell them about; only the mean-spirited would consider there to be a competition at all.

It's all those stories and how they braid together that tells us who and what and where we are