She felt like a fictional character who'd escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her, taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free.

A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.

While I wasn't certain how I felt about spiritualists, I was certain enough about the type of people who were drawn to them. Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.

Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.

Cassandra always hid when she read, though she never quite knew why. It was as if she couldn't shake the guilty suspicion that she was being lazy, that surrendering herself so completely to something so enjoyable must surely be wrong. But surrender she did. Let herself drop through the rabbit hole and into a tale of magic and mystery.

She'd slept terribly the night before. The room, the bed, were both comfortable enough, but she'd been plagued with strange dreams, the sort that lingered upon waking but slithered away from memory as she tried to grasp them. Only the tendrils of discomfort remained.

Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.