If more people recognized the difference between friendship and mere attraction, or how love must partake of both to prosper, I expect there'd be more happy people." "And a lot fewer poems and plays," I said, laughing as I splashed about in the scented water.

When people first discover beauty, they tend to linger. Even if they don’t at first recognize it for what it is.

A wager?" I repeated. "Yes," he said, and gave me a slow smile, bright with challenge. ... "Stake?" I asked cautiously. He was still smiling, an odd sort of smile, hard to define. "A kiss." My first reaction was outrage, but then I remembered that I was on my way to Court, and that had to be the kind of thing they did at Court. And if I win I don't have to collect. I hesitated only a moment longer, lured by the thought of open sky, and speed, and winning. "Done," I said.

The only noise now was the rain, pattering softly with the magnificent indifference of nature for the tangled passions of humans.

Why did I laugh at his sorry, bedraggled appearance? Because ridiculousness made a repellant situation more bearable.

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

It would have been funny if I had been an observer and not a participant, an idea that gave me a disconcerting insight into gossip. As I walked beside the silent Tamara, I realized that despite how entertaining certain stories were, at the bottom of every item of gossip there was someone getting hurt.