He spends the majority of the evening in the company of Celia Bowen, whose elaborate gown changes color, shifting through a rainbow of hues to compliment whoever she is closest to.

This is not magic. This is the way the world is, only very few people take the time to stop and note it.

I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held.

I have absurdly vivid dreams.

The finest of pleasures are always the unexpected ones.

Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case.

People see what they wish to see. And in most cases, what they are told that they see.

Only the ship is made of books, its sails thousands of overlapping pages, and the sea it floats upon is dark black ink.

Tarot is just stories on cards.

Even the air feels different on Halloween, autumn-crisp and bright.

Love is fickle and fleeting," Tsukiko continues. "It is rarely a solid foundation for decisions to be made upon, in any game.

Here the clouds constantly adjusted like obedient phantoms, so that shadows never lengthened or shortened. At any point in space, Limbo never became any darker or lighter than the moment before.

Family. The greatest loyalty after God.

Her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take the place. What that 'something' was she had no idea.

Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?

For a while after college, I was thinking of becoming a fitness trainer, and I am a certified aqua trainer.

I pray every night before I go to sleep and every morning when I wake up.

Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots.

Being busy and being productive are not necessarily the same. Many people keep busy to avoid taking action on things they're afraid to pursue.

The sole way to save oneself is to save others. Or to struggle to save others -even that is sufficient.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that we are unique. The greatest discovery of the next generation, I pray, is that we are one.