I'm afraid my voice is going to break. I am afraid she is going to hear how much this hurts.

The row of dolls watched her impassively from the bookshelf, their tea party propriety almost certainly offended.

Occasionally, there are battles in the sky. One likes to imagine the angels are always triumphant. One does not like to think of the ancient and terrible scales balancing the infernal and divine as wobbling back and forth. Tilting freely, to and fro. One does not like to think that sometimes it is the angel that falls.

If they were real, then maybe the world was big enough to have magic in it. And if there was magic — even bad magic, and Zach knew it was more likely that there was bad magic than any good kind — then maybe not everyone had to have a story like his father's, a story like the kind all the adults he knew told, one about giving up and growing bitter.

We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be

Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first.

You are more dangerous than daybreak.