...but the tale itself is a trickster and doesn't hesitate to lie. It is anachronistic with a vengeance. It emerges always and everywhere, overt or disguised, pureblood or hybrid, and healthy as sin.

And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done.

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

Galinda didn't often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversations was flow.

It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?

What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.

The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace.