Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.

You must learn to know the difference between tales and the truth, my Liza, she would say. Fairy tales have a habit of ending too soon. They never show what happens afterwards when the prince and princess ride off the page.

True love, it's like an illness. I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things. Now I do. It's an illness. You can catch it when you least expect. There's no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it's fatal.

A twinge at the edge of her lips and she continued, the soft, slow lilt of recitation: "Ancient walls that sing the distant hours.

Hope, how she had grown to hate the word. It was an insideious seed planted inside a person's soul, surviving covertly on little tending, then flowering so spectacularly that none could help but cherish it.

Ah, well. Life's too short for moderation, wouldn't you say?

Oh, there was harm indeed for a young lady flattered by the brief attentions of a handsome man.