Wake the sleeper must, and confront his fears, or risk being lost in the dark places of the mind forever.

I wonder how it takes you, that moment when everything turns to shadows. - Somerled.

Why should I be polished and improved like goods for sale? I might not even want to marry! And besides, I have many skills. I can read and write and play the flute and harp. Why should I change to please some man? If he doesn’t like me the way I am, then he can get some other girl for his wife.

Death, of course, should not be feared, but awaited with certain wonder. To die was to step across a threshold into a new world, unknown, unimaginable.

There was so much of beauty here: the neat, small tracks of a foraging creature, stoat or marten; the inticate tracery of a skeleton leaf, still clinging vainly to its parent tree as, little by little, time stripped it of its substance, leaving only the delicate remembrance of what it had been.

As a novelist, I'm endlessly fascinated by human behavior and interactions.

I should have realized, when Cathal kissed me in the hallway, that my response was the first raindrop heralding a storm.