"The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry 'Monster!' and looked behind him."

"If you can kill it, or it can kill you, it's real."

"And Esme remembered in a rush--the wolfsong, the haunting, lyrical spirals of it in the dawn quiet and the feeling of euphoria that had attended it. Even in recollection the howling uplifted her like the crescendo at the end of a symphony and made her heartbeat quicken."

"It was sadness, lostness, and the worst thing about it was the way it seemed like a default-like it was there all the time, and all her other expressions were just an array of masks she used to cover it up."

"Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx."

"My tiny scary friend is coming."

"My phone buzzes. It's from Karou: a list of conversation openers that I won't be needing. -a) Hi. I'm Zuzana. I'm actually a marionette brought to life by the Blue Fairy, and the only way I can gain a soul is if a human falls in love with me. Help a puppet out? -b) Hi. I'm Zuzana. The touch of my lips imparts immortality. Just sayin'. -c) Hi. I'm Zuzana. I think I might like you."

"There was darkness, and monsters vast as worlds swam in it."

"As for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths - intrusions of reality into fantasy, like toast crumbs on a wizard's beard."

"I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar."

"It was impossible, of course. But when did that ever stop any dreamer from dreaming."

"As long as you're alive, there's always a chance things will get better."

"And if redemption was self-serving, coming as it did ribbon-tied to what he wanted most in life? For once, Akiva's shame wouldn't rise to the bait. He wanted what he'd always wanted, and he'd better just say it, his own worries and fears be damned."

"There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it's hurtling forward-toward what?"

"There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms."

"You've got to have, like, a lentil for a soul to hate wiener dogs."

"Papilio stomachus: fragile creatures, vulnerable to forst and betrayal."

"To stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength."

"It was hope, dying unsurprised."

"She'd spoken of their happiness as though it were an undeniable fact, no matter what happened--apart from everything else and not subject to it. It was a new idea for him, that happiness wasn't a mystical place to be reached or won--some bright terrain beyond the boundary of misery, a paradise waiting for them to find it--but something to carry doggedly with you through everything, as humble and ordinary as your gear and supplies. Food, weapons, happiness.With hope that the weapons could in time vanish from the picture."

"She had inherited a story that was strewn with corpses and clotted with enmity, and was only trying to stay alive in it."

"It is bodies that make us real. What is a soul without eyes to look through or hands to hold?"

"Even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself."

"In moments Akiva was up in the ether, scarcely feeling the sting of ice crystals in the thin air. He let his glamour fall away, and his wings were like sheets of fire sweeping the black of the heavens. He moved at speed, onward toward another human city to find another doorway bitter with the devil's magic, and after that another, until all bore the black handprint....Once all the doors were marked, the end would begin. And it would begin with fire."

"This wasn't a person, Zuzana thought, this was greed wearing skin."

"The silence, she thought, was remarkable: a perfect, shimmering thing, and fragile. Like glass, if it shattered, it would never come back together again."

"He wasn't an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about."

"Humans had a genius for devising instruments of death. Their lives were so short and they seemed to value them so little, sending waves of men to clash in battlefields, then weighing victory by the piled corpses. And if they held their own lives so worthless, the lives of everything else were as fruit to pluck from trees."

"There are boys you look at and want to touch with your mouth, and there are boys you look at and want to wear one of those surgical masks everyone in China had during bird flu. There are a lot more bird-flu boys at large."

"Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there's no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic."

"It didn't matter; by now she knew she loved him in any skin. In her book there was another tale - one of the original eighteen - of a dragon who had a human wife, and Neve had never understood it before, at least from the wifes point of view. Love was love. But she hoped that he was not a dragon."

"What do you think I live on, rainwater and daydreams?"

"Brimstone once told me that to stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength."

"It was interesting the way a small hate could grow inside a big hate and take it over."

"It's like all my life I've been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I'm not a tower at all. I'm a lighthouse. It's like waking up. I am incandescent."

"I think you're a fairy tale. I think you're magical, and brave, and exquisite. And I hope you'll let me be in your story."

"He'd sooner die trying to hold the world on his shoulders than running away. Better always to run toward. And so he did."

"It was cruel. Like opening a birdcage to let the bird fly out, whilst all the while it's tethered by the leg, and freedom is only an illusion."

"What a lovely display of personhood. He's like a good book cover that grabs your gaze. Read me. I'm fun but smart. You won't be able to put me down."

"Happiness. It was the place where passion, with all its dazzle and drumbeat, met something softer: homecoming and safety and pure sunbeam comfort. It was all those things, intertwined with the heat and the thrill, and it was as bright within her as a swallowed star."

"Be an unstoppable force. Write with an imaginary machete strapped to your thigh. This is not wishy-washy, polite, drinking-tea-with-your-pinkie-sticking-out stuff. It's who you want to be, your most powerful self. Write your books. Finish them, then make them better. Find the way. No one will make this dream come true for you but you."

"It was the only lullaby she would ever sing, and it was sung in Hell."

"Again his memory failed to conjure her face. It was like trying to call up a melody while another song played."

"What can a soldier do when mercy is treason, and he is alone in it?"

"He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant."

"It's like losing gravity and falling into space " the moment of pitching headlong when the endlessness of space asserts itself and there is no more down, only an eternity of up, and you realize you can fall forever and never run out of stars."

"Life is you master, or death is."

"What's a horizon?' Lazlo asked, straight-faced. 'Is it like the end of an aisle of books?"

"Did you know that mako shark fetuses eat each other in the womb?... Its true. Only cannibal fetuses survive to be born. Can you imagine if people were like that?"

"Because hope comes from in you, and wishes are just magic."