When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it.

So let my hands and my face make their way in this world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.

...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.

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.

He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.

...No opening sermons concerning children with humps and fins for limbs, who nonetheless, immortal souls all, deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals.

For fun? Maybe evil is an art form.