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.

...looking at him makes her feel like laughing all over - as if she could laugh not just with her mouth but with her eyes, her heart, her very limbs.

The story of Mirror Mirror is in many ways a story about evolution. Its about the evolution of a child into an adult. Its about the evolution of those dwarves into something a little less rock-like, a little more humanoid. Its about the evolution of history, too, from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Age of Reason.

That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?

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.

Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

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