The magician was studying her face with his green eyes. "Your face is wet," he said worriedly. "I hope that's spray. If you've become human enough to cry, then no magic in the world — oh, it must be spray. Come with me. It had better be spray.

...because in a way it happened to someone else. I don't really speak that person's language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don't want to forget her, I don't want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I've been me so far.

If she had touched me," he said very softly, "I would have been hers and not my own, not ever again. I wanted her to touch me but I could not let her. No cat will. We let human beings caress us because it is pleasant enough and calms them - but not her. The price is more than a cat can pay.

Beyond the town, darker than dark, King Haggard's castle teetered like a lunatic on stilts.

A rhinoceros is as ugly as a human being, and it too is going to die, but at least it never thinks that it is beautiful.

But what I thought, and what I still think, and always will, is that she saw me. Nobody else has ever seen me — me, Jenny Gluckstein — like that. Not my parents, not Julian, not even Meena. Love is one thing — recognition is something else.

Marveling at his own boldness, he said softly, "I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me.