"And everything with wings is restless, aimless, drunk and dour; butterflies and birds collide, at hot ungodly hours. And my clay-coloured motherlessness rangily reclines; come on home now! All my bones are dolorous with vines!"

"Emily, I saw you last night by the river I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever In a mud cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror."

"I do as I please. Now I'm on my knees. Your skin is something that I stir into my tea. And I am watching you and you are starry, starry, starry..."

"While yonder, wild and blue, the wild blue yonder looms. 'Till we are wracked with rheum, by roads, by songs entombed."

"Go to sleep, you stunning sky, gently creep, cunning by A quiet hum is amplified by your thumb that you suck dry A hundred raging waters snare the lonely sigh Hold your breath and clasp at Cassiopeia."

"And the love we hold, and the love we spurn, Will never grow cold, only taciturn"

"And all that we built, and all that we breathed And all that we spilled or pulled up like weeds Is piled up in back and it burns irrevocably And we spoke up in turns 'til the silence crept over me."

"I killed my dinner with karate kicked him in the face,taste the body, shallow work is the work that I do."

"And a thimble's worth of milky moon Can touch hearts larger than a thimble."

"We sailed away on a winter's day With fate as malleable as clay But ships are fallible, I say And the nautical, as all things, fades."

"I can't call them linear narratives, and I can't call them chronological in a traditional, classical sense; I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I borrow more from William Faulkner than William Shakespeare. I just find it funny that at this point, we see a collection of highly charged, highly potent symbols as referring back to a classical aesthetic, because to me they seem deeply connected to the pedestrian actuality of real life."

"I don't necessarily see the elements that I invoke on the cover and in the songs as being in binary opposition. I know certain binary tensions emerge between these elements, but a lot of times they're more like archetypal elements; these free-standing, huge forces. Mortality, standing alone, as a thing; as opposed to, "Over here's life; over here's death. Here's bad luck, but here's blessing and redemption. Here's water; here's fire." Certainly those things come up again and again in the songs, but it's not intentional, and probably has more to do with the fact that those things emerge in real life, without any effort on our part whatsoever, than they are derived from any classical tradition. I think classicism in general might reflect more closely the natural order of human life, while postmodernism is somehow removed from the natural order, more cerebral and sterile, removed from real life on some level. So what seems like classicism in some of these songs might be just what I view as an accurate reflection of real life on this planet."

"[The title] was the last thing that I chose, after all the songs and the cover art were finished. So none of the songs directly allude to that myth. But the main themes that emerge out of that myth are really close to the themes on the record -- mortality, decadence, an excess of water, isolation, rebirth. The myth is also significant to me because of the way that I encountered it, which relates to one of the huge events the record is about. I also liked the power of the word itself. I liked how violent and cryptic it felt; it's such a daunting word to encounter. I like how it contrasted this finely rendered, carefully composed front cover -- the painting is information-dense, formal, and stylized; it looks the way something looks when a painter spends a year on it, which is what Benjamin [Vierling] did. So it has all this detail and carefulness to it, which was really important to me and relates very closely to the record. But I also felt like it needed some sort of ballast, or balance, next to it, to reflect the other elements of the record; its innate violence. I wanted a word that was like throwing a brick at the visual on the front cover; I liked that whenever someone looked at that cover they also had to encounter this short, weird word."

"Well, Nabokov is definitely my favorite author, though I feel strange calling him an "influence," since I can't trace the ways in which his writing may or may not have seeped into my own. But I also love William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, Kenneth Patchen, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Mark Helprin (who wrote a beautiful book called Winter's Tale), and Kurt Vonnegut. My favorite book of all time is The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle."

"My voice in combination with the harp - which, by the way, I use because I've played it my entire life, not to make some statement about the harp - somehow has … coloured people's interpretations of the music and projected an idea of childlike or fairytale quality or innocence. Which sometimes prevents people from listening to the songs the way I would like them to be listened to."

"I'm not terribly interested in playing harp on other people's music right now. Partly because I feel like many people view the harp as this kind of gimmick. You know, like they have songs that are fully realized, complete songs, and then they think "How do we make this special? - Ooh, let's bring the harp in!" and they kind of want a harpist to play a glissando and play some heavenly noise in the background. I'm really interested in the harp as a fully actualized, self-contained way of presenting songs. That there is a bass in the harp - there is a way to create a rhythmic sense without drums - there's a way to have all sorts of textural variations and expressive variations. I also don't want to feel bound to the harp, I'd be interested in bringing other instruments in at some time. But I think the harp has been viewed in one particular way for so long, and has been limited for so long, that I feel like I am really interested in stretching the boundaries of what it's capable of doing and how it's perceived."

"I have a lot of interest in interior rhyming; not just rhyming at the end of the lines, but playing around with rhymes within the lines, playing with where the syllabic emphases in the sentences are, lining those up at strange moments in the line of the song. I’m not sure if that comes across or not."

"Hung from the underbelly of the Earth While the stars skid away below Gormless and brakeless; gravel-loose Falling silent as gavels in the snow."

"And, for the sake of that pit of snakes, for whom did you allay your shyness, and spend all your mercy, and madness, and grace, in a day, beneath the bending cypress?"

"In this life, who did you love, beneath the drifting ashes, beneath the sheeting banks of air that barrenly bore our rations?"

"I may have changed, it's hard to gauge Time won't account for how I've aged Would that I could tie your lying tongue Who says that leaving keeps you young."

"Driven through by her own sword, summer died last night, alone."

"And, when the bulbs do flash, as bright as morning, the crowd keeps on gathering like an electric storm."

"With the loneliness of you mighty men, with your mighty kiss that might never, never end, while, so far away, in the seat of the West, burns the fount of the heat of that loneliness."

"Wolf-spider, crouch in your funnel nest. If I knew you, once, now I know you less. In the sinking sand, where we've come to rest, have I had a hand in your loneliness?"

"A feather of a hawk was bound Bound around my neck A poultice made of fig The eager little vultures pecked"

"And if you come and see me, you will upset the order. You cannot come and see me, for I set myself apart. But when you come and see me, in California, you cross the border of my heart."

"held her there, kicking and mewling, upended, unspooling, unsung and blue; told her "wherever you go, little runaway bunny, I will find you." And then she ran, as they're liable to do."

"People were dealing with CGI for the first time, so I think we were really unsure as to whether it would be a huge success or a big flop. … I thought the scripts were so good. It had a kind of domestic element which I'm not sure it ever had before. I think we were feeling quite confident about that. … In terms of whether it had a place in the world when it aired, I think everyone was quite unsure. I didn't know until it aired and people really seemed to like it."

"I just feel really content at the moment … I've done quite a lot of stuff and I don't have to feel desperate to do anything that radical or wild. I've set myself all these challenges and worked through them. I just feel I'm ready to be a mum now."

"I believe in being with someone for ever. Even though my marriage to Chris didn't work, I still don't consider it a failed marriage — it just came to its natural end. It didn't make me feel like I never wanted to get married again. I like sharing things with somebody."

"I don't think anyone understands anyone's job … We all have the same hang-ups. I get jealous if I know Laurence is kissing someone else."

"I think it must be hard being David. I get a certain level of attention but — I've seen it in action — he can't move for attention."

"I think people have common sense and can tell what's real, what's right or what's wrong and work it out."

"I was freakishly ambitious. I didn't want to be a child. I wanted my own flat, to work and be a grown up."

"You need your family in this business. It's one of the most important things to keep you grounded. You come home and your mom's like, "Clean the kitty's litter box." It's not like it's all about me."

"Being an actress doesn't make you popular in school. I was always leaving to make a movie then coming back in."

"It's important to me that I don't get trapped in the whole teen scene because I feel that you can get lost in those kind of movies, and they aren't really about the actors; they're about the selling of the concept, and how much money it makes. So I just try to choose the scripts that have the best characters for myself, or would be the most challenging, or fun."

"Actually, I believe in the third season, one of the characters says, "Three hundred and something", which is the number of days from that point that I would appear on the show. Which is awesome."

"I put out an ad in the classifieds: ‘Wanted, superhero. I’m a damsel in distress’."

"If you’re not falling, you’re not training hard enough."

"I'm usually the one who leaves a water bottle on set, because it gets thirsty under those bright lights."

"I've had experiences before where a director is like, "Yeah, I wanted a blonde." Have you heard of hair dye?"

"I feel that in order to truly be an actor, you have to differentiate yourself and your roles."

"I've always felt that kids are really smart."

"I was always wanting to learn and be one of those actresses who can actually hold a conversation as opposed to standing there looking pretty."

"I never had a stage mother, which is probably one of the reasons why I’m still doing this."

"My meeting with Joss at the beginning of the season was kind of like, "Alright, welcome to the cast, you're a teenager, you're a Key, have fun."

"When I'm shooting, I just try to make sure I wouldn't be embarrassed of it later, because in Watertown, you don't get away with anything."

"It's high school, man. They compare it to prison in the movie."