Weren’t all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!

He longed for the deep as she longed for the night sky and for white lilies floating on water -- although she still tried to convince herself that love alone could feed her soul.

Why did death make life taste so much sweeter? Why could the heart love only what it could also lose?

Mo could paint pictures in the empty air with his voice alone.

Because fear kills everything," Mo had once told her. "Your mind, your heart, your imagination.

Blue as the evening sky, blue as cranesbill flowers, blue as the lips of drowned men and the heart of a blaze burning with too hot a flame. Yes, sometimes it was hot in this world, too. Hot and cold, light and dark, terrible and beautiful, it was everything all at once. It wasn't true that you felt nothing in the land of Death. You felt and heard and smelled and saw, but your heart remained strangely calm, as if it were resting before the dance began again. Peace. Was that the word?

Sometimes, when you’re sad you don’t know what to do, it helps to be angry. But then the tears come back again all the same, and you fall asleep with the salty taste of them on your lips.