The storm dropped a house on her head.

The sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation on which to build.

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.

In summer moonlight, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.

I was just about to begin writing Mirror Mirror, within about a week of it, when September 11, 2001 happened. I found myself incapable of caring about fiction-making for a number of months.

If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it.

The answer of course, is that the clock isn't meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul. Redemption and condemnation time. For the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment.