The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief.

How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.

She wasn't afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.

Why lock yourself in your own cage when someone is handing you a key?

We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls.

The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

Elena had always felt like the center of her own world - who doesn't? The world arranged itself around her like petals around the stem of a flower. This way the meadows, that way the woodland. Over here, the baryn's estate, out there, the hills that hug the known world close and imply a world at beyond. She could never come up with the edge of a world, because it always kept going on beyond. She moved the center of the world as she walked. The world was balanced on her head.