One doesn't lose a self, like a pair of gloves or a pine. We learn and change, or we harden into stone.

Why is it the songs all end with the good people winning, but in life they don't?" They don't make songs when the good lose," I muttered. "They make war chants against the bad. So there won't be any songs for us.

Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water.

Because you showed one face to all the rest of the world, and another to me.

Finally someone takes me seriously enough to ask for my word of honor, and it’s a villain.

No, I don't think I could fall in love with him, handsome though he is, because I don't accept any of that huff he gives me about my great beauty and all that. I'd have to trust a man's words before I could love him. I think.

Female authors were still using male names when I was young, or they were neatly shoehorned into womens books except for those few that men could always point at when the disparity was pointed out.