Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon . . . is not the dragon the hero of his own story?

I keep waiting for things to get back down to whelming, but they stay at overwhelming.

You don't have to be a chef or even a particularly good cook to experience proper kitchen alchemy: the moment when ingredients combine to form something more delectable than the sum of their parts.

This is not magic. This is the way the world is, only very few people take the time to stop and note it.

Do you remember all of your audiences?" Marco asks. "Not all of them," Celia says. "But I remember the people who look at me the way you do." "What way might that be?" "As though they cannot decide if they are afraid of me or they want to kiss me." " I am not afraid of you," Marco says.

They say it's darkest before the dawn, but it also tend to be quietest, and the quiet lets you hear yourself better.

Wine is bottled poetry, he thinks.