Fire sat unbreathing. A life that was an apology for the life of his father: It was a notion she could understand, beyond words and thought. She understood it the way she understood music.

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

Gratitude takes less energy than anger.

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.

She would like to restrain from cruelty and receive no admiration for it.

It was just that she had the need to tell him something honest, something honest and unhappy, because cheerful lies tonight were too depressing and too sharp, turning in on her like pins

Katsa and Po were trying to drown each other and, judging from their hoots of laughter, enjoying it immensely.