“Ronin Flynn, you might undo me." "I'm already undone, Gidge. I'm just hoping you'll stick around long enough to put me back together.”

“Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.”

“Congratulations," he said, his voice dry. "You finally managed to find a woman as tragically noble as yourself. I didn't think one existed." "I'm not tragic." Kaldar held up his hand. "Spare me. Some children are born wearing a silk shirt; you were born wrapped in melancholy. When they slapped you to make you cry, you just sighed heavily and a single tear rolled from your eye." He dragged his finger from the corner of his left eye to his cheek. " Your first words were probably 'woe is me.'" "My first words were 'Kaldar, shut up!' because you talked too much. Still do.”

“Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.” I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. “Gets away from what, though?” “From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn’t really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like ‘happy’ and ‘good’ will never find her.” “You don’t want her to be happy and good?” “I’m not sure what’s really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin.”

“Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are -- a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.”

“Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.”

“God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother's heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so.”

“I don't know how it is...but you seem to think me something wonderful, and indeed, I am not.”