BOOKS AND ROSES

• "It was both a comfort and a great frustration to Montse, this... what could she call it, a notion, a suggestion, a promise? This promise that somebody was coming back for her."
• "At any rate it was the Benedictine friars who fed and clothed and carried Montse, and went through the horrors of the teething process with her, and rang the chapel bells for hours the day she spoke her first words."
• "She sketched with an effort that strained every limb. Montse saw that the Señora sometimes grew short of breath though she'd hardly stirred. A consequence of snatching images out of the air - the air took something back."
• "As they came to understand each other they learned that what they'd been afraid of was running out of self. On the contrary, the more they loved, the more there was to love."
• "What Lucy liked best about her casement window view was that as nighttime turned into dawn, the mountain seemed to travel down the street. It advanced on tiptoe, fully prepared to be shooed away. Insofar as a purely transient construction of flesh and blood can remember (or foretell) what it is to be stone, Lucy understood the mountain's wish to listen at the window of a den of gamblers and be warmed by all that free-floating hope and desolation. Her wish for the mountain was that it would one day shrink to a pebble, crash in through the glass, and roll into a corner to happily absorb tavern life for as long as the place stayed standing."
• "Señora Lucy's separation from Safiye meant that she often painted landscapes in which she looked for her. Señora Lucy was rarely visible in these paintings, but Safiye always was, and looking at the paintings engaged you in her search for a lost woman, an uneasy search because somehow in these pictures seeing her never meant the same thing as having found her."

"SORRY" DOESN'T SWEETEN HER TEA

• "In the room I'm watching her from, the curtains hang so still that breathing isn't quite enough to make me believe there's air in here."
• "Tyche's beauty is interestingly kinetic; it comes and goes and comes back again. Or maybe it's more that you observe it in the first second of seeing her and then she makes you shelve that exquisite first impression for a while so she can get on with things. Then in some moment when she's not talking or when she suddenly turns her head, it hits you all over again."

IS YOUR BLOOD AS RED AS THIS?

• "I've got something that other lovers would give a great deal to possess: a perfect memory of the very first time I saw you."
• "Sometimes I dream I'm falling, and it's not so much frightening as it is tedious, just falling and falling until I'm sick of it, but then a noose stops me short and I think, well, at least I'm not falling anymore."
• "It was simple: if I talked to you, perhaps you would kiss me. And I had to have a kiss from you: to have seen your lips and not ever kissed them would have been the ruin of me."
• "And I'd say his puppets have a nihilistic spirit, if you'd understand what I meant by that.... Sometimes his puppets won't perform at all. He just lets them sit there, watching us. Then he has them look at each other and then back at us until it feels as if they have information, some kind of dreadful information about each and every one of us, and you begin to wish they'd decide to keep their mouths shut forever."
• "I think the soul must be heavy and smooth, Myrna: I deduce this from the buoyant, jerky movements of puppets, which lack souls."
• "Did you make her yourself? No, I found her. I know she doesn't look like a puppet, but she is one. I know it because when I first picked her up, I said something I'd never said before. I put her down and then when I picked her up I said the thing again without meaning to, and again it was something I hadn't said before, even though the words were the same."
• "A beauty that rattles you until you're in tears, that was my introduction to Rowan Wayland."
• "[The puppets] were not living, but one step away from living, always one step away. They know when human life is near them, and they need human life to be near them; it keeps them from going...wrong."
• "Each puppet sacrificed something - a leg, an arm, torso, head, and so on.... They assembled a body but didn't join up the parts....It happened hour by hour, I would drowse a little and when I woke another part of me had been replaced."
• "The problem with Wayland is that he's a puppet built to human scale. Masterless and entirely alive. No matter how soft his skin appears to be he is entirely wooden, and it is not known exactly what animates him - no clock ticks in his chest."
• "Rowan is male to me, since he moves and speaks with a grace that reminds me of the boys and men of my Venetian youth. He's female to Myrna. For Radha and Gustav, Rowan is both male and female. Perhaps we read him along the lines of our attractions; perhaps it really is as arbitrary as that. He just shrugs and says: Take your pick. I'm mostly tree, though."
• "There was affection between mother and daughter, bu they'd given up trying to express it; rather than force a display they simply asked for each other's good faith."

DROWNINGS

• "Light felt like levitation to Giacomo, and darkness was like damnation. How had he lived so long without being torn apart by one or the other?"
• "I remember a dawn when my heart / got tied in a lock of your hair."
• "She took him in her arms and fed him to the fire he'd started. There was still quite a lot of him let when he jumped into the swamp, but the drowned held grudges and heaved him out onto land again, where he lay roasting to death while his bride strolled back toward the city, peeling blackened patches of wedding dress off her as she went."

PRESENCE

• "His contributions to their joint bank account tripled hers, but she wouldn't have a problem doing without handwoven rugs at home and boutique hotels abroad. Doing without Jacob himself was going to make her a little bit crazy for a long time, so no she wasn't going to make it easy for him to say his piece and then leave."
• "Get this through your head, Jill Akkerman: I'm not leaving you. And you - are you leaving me? I'm not leaving you, Jacob Wallace."
• "Jill knew what all the boys had done, or as much as they would admit to, anyway.... Many of them called her Miss, quite tenderly - tell me if anyone's rude to you, Miss. Just tell me his name, yeah? - as if she was their favorite teacher at school. She had hope for them."
• "He was like a boy in a fairy tale; there was a set of steps he was to follow with no concession whatsoever as to how others viewed his actions. Then at the end of it all there'd be a reward."

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE HOMELY WENCH SOCIETY

• "When she surveyed the entire scene, it seemed to be one that the stained glass figures were dreaming. And she was there too, living what was dreamed."

DORNICKA AND THE ST. MARTIN'S DAY GOOSE

• "It had been a good walk, up a sunlit path encircled by bands of brown and gray; it had been like walking an age in a tree's life, that ring of color in the trunk's cross section."

FREDDY BARRANDOV CHECKS... IN?

• "At the front desk of the Glissando, guests can request and receive anything, anything at all."
• "Aisha's other passions expose her. She loves cinema so well that I can find her there, hints and clues in each of her favorites. I know whose insolent lip curl she imitates when she hears an order she has no intention of following, and I know who she's quoting when she drawls, Oh, honey, when I lose my temper you can't find it anyplace!"