That's Venus, September thought. She was the goddess of love. It's nice that love comes on first thing in the evening and goes out last in the morning. Love keeps the light on all night.

Shoes are funny beasts. You think they're just clothes, but really, they're alive. They want things. Fancy ones with gems want to go to balls, big boots want to go to work, slippers want to dance. Or sleep. Shoes make the path you're on. Change your shoes, change the path.

The thing to decide is what kind of monster to be. The kind who builds towns or the kind who breaks them.

But the story is no good without a villain. It can’t feel true without a villain. Otherwise, everything would already be as it ought to be, yes? Someone has to be at fault. And if you are the hero, it stands to reason that folk who do not look like you or talk like you or like to eat the same things you like to eat must be the villains. After all, the world is easy and simple, is it not?

Well, very splendid and very frightening. But splendid things are often frightening. Sometimes, it’s the fright that makes them splendid at all.

I opened my door and everything they had for me was tainted because the land of Used-to-Be is just full of ghosts starving for your breath.

A ring don’t make a bride, that’s all.

Every morning she pulled a delicate cup from its brass hook and filled it, hoping that it would be dark and deep and secret as a forest, and each morning it cooled too fast, had too much milk, stained the cup, made her nervous.

It was late spring when Marya Morevna slid her brass key into the lock of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, feeling it slide, too, between her own ribs, and open her like a reliquary full of old, nameless bones.

All coral in every world think of Australia the way that you and I think of Mesopotamia – it is the ancestral paradise of their civilization and they send it Valentines each February.