Are you saying you don't love me?" Hazael asked Liraz. "Because I love you. I think." He paused in contemplation. "Oh. No. Never mind. That's fear.

Kissing can ruin lives. Lips touch sometimes teeth clash. New hunger is born with a throb and caution falls away. A cursed girl with lips still moist from her first kiss might feel suddenly wild like a little monsoon. She might forget her curse just long enough to get careless and let it come true. She might kill everyone she loves.

This gown, is it cut from shadow?" the general asked. "I can barely feel it between my fingers." Not for want of trying, thought Madrigal. "Perhaps it is a reflection of the night sky," he suggested, "skimmed from a pond?" She supposed that he was being poetic. erotic, even. In return, as unerotically as possible- more like complaining of a stain that wouldn't come out-she said, "Yes, my lord. I went for a dip, and the reflection clung.

This is the story of the curse and the kiss, the demon and the girl. It's a love story with dancing and death in it, and singing and souls and shadows reeled out on kite strings.

The sooner you learn to finish things, and as a matter of course finish your creative endeavors, the better. It took me a long time to learn that.

It's not like there's a law against flying." "Yes there is. The law of gravity.

It's like all my life I've been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I'm not a tower at all. I'm a lighthouse. It's like waking up. I am incandescent.