Cats and ghosts both partook of the saucers of milk and that was okay. They consumed different parts of it: the cats its substance, the ghosts its essence, and none went to waste.

Better to be the cat gazing coolly down from a high wall, its expression inscrutable. The cat that shunned petting, that needed no one. Why couldn't she be that cat?

Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there's no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.

Love affair. Doesn't that sound so middle-aged? And also ill-fated. Like ill-fated is an understood prefix to love affair. Well, ill-fated is fine, as long as it's a meaty and fraught ill-fated love affair, not a pale and insipid one.

An idea fell like a seed and over the next weeks it went on growing like a fig vine lush and conquering twining round her old beliefs and covering them in new growth until they were as invisible as a tiger in a thicket and just as deadly.

Magic won't save us. The power it would take to conjure on such a scale, the tithe would destroy us. The only hope...is hope. You don't need tokens for it - it's in your heart or nowhere. And in your heart, child, it had been stronger than I have ever seen.

I want to touch with my mouth. His mouth, with my mouth. Maybe his neck, too. But first things first: Make him aware I exist. It’s possible that he is already aware, if only in a ‘don't step on the small girl’ kind of way.