Tea is the magic key to the vault where my brain is kept.

Mosca said nothing. The word ‘damsel’ rankled with her. She suddenly thought of the clawed girl from the night before, jumping the filch on an icy street. Much the same age and build as Beamabeth, and far more beleaguered. What made a girl a ‘damsel in distress’? Were they not allowed claws? Mosca had a hunch that if all damsels had claws they would spend a lot less time ‘in distress’.

Making a wish is like saying, 'I can't deal with anything, I give up, somebody bigger come along and solve it all instead.

It was all very well being told that she could do nothing to make things better. Neverfell did not have the kind of mind that could take that quietly. She did not have the kind of mind that could be quiet at all.

So this was a nest of radicals. She thought a hotbed of sedition would involve more gunpowder and secret handshakes, and less shuffling of feet and passing the sugar.

The world is like a broken wrist that healed the wrong way, and will never be the same again.

Perhaps illnesses could be left behind, just like small, badly concealed china corpses.