"Souls aren’t discrete units — or even units at all. They’re more like reflections of consciousness in a fractured mirror."
- Colleen Chen
"Souls are simply aspects of ego splintered off from Mae and Jin, the two original gods. They began with no ego at all, you know. But as they gained awareness of themselves, each affirmation of somethi..."
"The nobles had made reading unpopular, as it showed that one couldn’t afford to buy spells or magical devices, since one had to get knowledge to do things the ordinary way; even if this view held litt..."
"Part of her exulted that he’d asked her, out of everyone in the coach, this question; he must think her intelligent. The rest of her, though, wanted to slap herself for disproving his thought. Here wa..."
"Vesper felt herself turning red with humiliation. Then she looked at Allegra—really looked at her. Maybe she’d had such a problem with people not seeing her because she wasn’t seeing them. Did Allegra..."
"To him, she was one of the few girls who was nice to him, the stodgy son of a poor alcoholic shoemaker with such little status that he seemed unlikely to even get one wife, let alone the three or more..."
"Nim looked aghast. “Of course not. Do you think my future wife would be a servant? No—it’s Number Seven of the wives. Her name is Begonia.”“Oh, no, Nim,” Vesper said. “You can’t fall for one of the wi..."
"For everything about him fitting her fantasy image of what she wanted, she still didn’t feel seen by him…and that made her all the more aware that maybe her fantasy wasn’t what she wanted at all."
"Happily-ever-after monogamy has been reinforced so steadily in literature that we tend to feel like failures when we don’t achieve that in reality."
"She’d never spoken to anyone before of this business of being seen, loved for who she was; to have it voiced by this man she’d just met sent chills down her spine."