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"I wish stories were kinder to their characters,' Maddie said. 'But I guess trouble is more interesting to read about."
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"But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended."

"One thing I've learned about vampires--they keep pulling new rabbits out of their cloaks. Big, fanged, carnivorous bunnies that'll eat your eyeballs if you're not paying attention."

"With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible."

"What Hamlet suffers from is a lack of zombies. Let us say Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show up-Ho-HO! Now you've got something that stirs the, um, something that stirs things that are stirrable. BOOM! A pack of ravenous flesh-eaters breaks open their heads and sucks out their eyeballs. No need for iambic pentameter because they are grunting, groaning annihilators of humanity with no time for meter. You're not asleep in the back of English class anymore, are you? This is what I'm talking about. Zombies. Learn it, live it, love it."

"We'd read about sirens in English this fall; Greek mythology bullshit about women so beautiful, their voices so enchanting, that men did anything for them. Turned out that mythology crap was real because every time I saw her, I lost my mind."

"Guess we're going north," Dev said slowly."Everyone, follow Lassie.Timmy's in the well."

"I write fiction""What's fiction?""Fiction is an improvement on life."

"Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species."
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"I let my head fall back, and I gazed into the Eternal Blue Sky. It was morning. Some of the sky was yellow, some the softest blue. One small cloud scuttled along. Strange how everything below can be such death and chaos and pain while above the sky is peace, sweet blue gentleness. I heard a shaman say once, the Ancestors want our souls to be like the blue sky."

"It doesn't seem to matter what we think...The prince will come up here and look at us as if we're barrels in a trader's wagon. And if I'm salt pork and he doesn't care for salt pork, then there's nothing I can do."

"I'm a terrible prince. I should put my kingdom first and everything else second, but your first. I want you by my side every second, but I know I would crumble if I lost you."

"A cat can make you feel well rested when you're tired or turn a rage into a calm just by sitting on your lap. His very nearness is a healing song."

"Seriously, a thirty-something woman shouldn't be daydreaming about a fictional character in a two-hundred-year-old world to the point where it interfered with her very real and much more important life and relationships. Of course she shouldn't."

"The snow was too light to stay, the ground too warm to keep it. And the strange spring snow fell only in that golden moment of dawn, the turning of the page between night and day."

"Mama used to say, you have to know someone a thousand days before you can glimpse her soul."

"Do you know the feeling you get when you are awakened in the middle of a dream? The dream story is still real and full of color, but the waking world is rushing back into your mind. And for a moment both worlds are true, and you cannot quite tell them apart."
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