We're all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away--our stories. I guess that's what I love about books--they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be.

Learn to master yourself-to understand both your fears and your desires. That's the key to magic. Then, no one shall have any hold over you. Remember... the magic (sic)... is a living thing, joined to whomever it touches and changed by them as well... You must come to know everything-even your darkest corners. Especially those...Everything has its price.

I told myself it was the snow—she couldn’t possibly get to Philadelphia on the roads. I told myself a hundred lies. Children do that. It’s amazing the sorts of things you’ll make yourself believe.

Her eyes take on that suspicious, wounded look girls get when they know they've fallen off the top rung of friendship and someone else has passed them, but they don't know when or how the change took place.

Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy?

He said to tell you to remember your heart in all things, that it is where your honor and your destiny will be found. Does it mean anything to you?' It is something he would say from time to time-that the eye could be misled, but that the heart was true.

You can never know about about your own destiny: are the people you meet there to play a part on your oun destiny, or do you exist just to play a role in theirs?