The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other.

Every seed has a story.

When I start writing novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry, rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.

You never know who it's going to be, or what they'll bring, but whatever it is, it's always exactly what is needed.

But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.

She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe was constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives. That’s what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again. And just like that, you die.

language is magical - it's a form of conjuring. If you do it convincingly, readers will follow you.