When I left you, you were already more beautiful than anything I dared to dream. In our years apart, my imaginings did their best to improve on your perfection. At night, your face was forever behind my eyes. And now I see that that vision who kept me company in my loneliness was a hag compared to the beauty now before me.

Get used to disappointment.

Mawidge is a dweam wiffin a dweam. The dweam of wuv wapped wiffin the gweater dweam of everwasting west. Eternity is our fwiend, wemember that, and wuv wiw fowwow you fowever.

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write…But this is life on earth, you can't have everything.

I can't keep my head above water one minute to the next: it's not just the parties and the goo-gooing with what's-her-name, I've got the decide how long the Five Hundredth Anniversary Parade is going to be and where does it start and when does it start and which nobleman gets to march in front of which other nobleman so that everyone's still speaking to me at the end of it, plus I've got a wife to murder and a country to frame for it, plus I've got to get the war going once that's all happened, and all this is stuff I've got to do myself. Here's what it all comes down to: I'm just swamped, Ty.

Anything there is that I can do for you, I will do for you; anything there is that I cannot do, I will learn to do.

The boys. The village boys. The beef-witted featherbrained rattleskulled clodpated dimdomed noodle-noggined sapheaded lunk-knobbed boys. How could anybody accuse her of stealing them? Why would anybody want them anyway?