It stared at them, and it paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heart beats.

Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.

Nice' in a bodyguard is about as useful as the ability to regurgitate whole lobsters.

You can always cheat an honest man, but it takes more work.

There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.

She's not dead. You didn't kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She's been given her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfishes' tails had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, 'Will she be the same?

It's not sipping wine. It's a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this.