You're good at love," she said simply, because it seemed to her that it was true. "I'm not so good at love. I'm like a barbed creature. I push everyone I love away." He shrugged. "I don't mind you pushing me away if it means you love me, little sister.

Everybody was strange. In a fit of frustration, she scratched out strange and wrote the word CRACKPOTS in big letters.

While I was looking the other way your fire went out. Left me with cinders to kick into dust, what a waste of the wonder you were

Dear Brigan, she thought to herself. People want incongruous, impossible things. Horses do, too.

He said, ‘The moment I began to love you was the moment when you saw your fiddle smashed on the ground, and you turned away from me and cried against your horse. Your sadness is one of the things that makes you beautiful to me. Don’t you see that? I understand it. It makes my own sadness less frightening.

It humbles me, but it doesn't humiliate me.

She'd lost her fury, somewhere, as they'd talked. She didn't feel it anymore. She wished she did, because she preferred it to the emptiness that had settled in its place.