The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.

Alexandra sighed. "I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours if you care enough about me to take it.

The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.

One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.

A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.

I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.

Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property; but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.