"We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favours, we’re completely beside ourselves."
- Karen Joy Fowler
"There was no point in telling my father. He'd never let me quit after only one day. He couldn't help me and he'd make some terrible blunder if he tried. Parents are too innocent for the Boschian lands..."
"So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can't tell you how much this offends me."
"Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness."
"We don't choose whom we love,” he told Maura, so gently that she knew he knew. If she wasn't going to be loved in return, she would have liked not to be pitied for it. She got neither of these wishes...."
"He envied the bark, which had been, in the course of one lifetime, both forest and fire. One endured; one destroyed."
"The dogs came racing up the stairs. They danced at Rima's feet, frantic with the need to communicate something to her. Little Timmy's down the well! Feed us ice cream and potato chips! Sometimes there..."
"But I knew that, both in fairyland and the real world, too, wishes were a slipperier things."
"Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come."
"Like they say, you never know a person till you’ve done time with them."