She turns her head, Bailey catches her eye, and she smiles at him. Not in the way that one smiles at a random member of the audience when one is in the middle of performing circus tricks with unusually talented kittens but in the way that one smiles when one recognizes someone they have not seen in some time.

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?

Follow your dreams Bailey. Be they Harvard or somehing else entirely. No matter what that father of yours says, or how loudly he might say it. He forgets that he was someone's dream once, himself

I find I think of myself not as a writer so much as someone who provides a gateway, a tangential route for readers to reach the circus. To visit the circus again, if only in their minds, when they are unable to attend it physically. I relay it through printed words on crumpled newsprint, words that they can read again and again, returning to the circus whenever they wish, regardless of time of day or physical location. Transporting them at will. When put that way, it sounds rather like magic, doesn't it? p.369

There is so much that glows in the circus, from flames to lanterns to stars. I have heard the expression “trick of the light” applied to sights within Le Cirque des Reves so frequently that I sometimes suspect the entirety of the circus is itself a complex illusion of illumination” .

Have you tried the cinnamon things?" Poppet asks. "They're rather new. What are they called, Widge?" "Fantastically delicious cinnamon things?

I do not see as well without her. I do not hear as well without her. I do not feel as well without her. I would be better off without a hand or a leg than without my sister.