"Watching him, Sara knew that what he said was ninety percent bravado. Still there was nothing wrong with that. Bravery was in knowing the odds and still going against them."

"“I don’t care what he told you. He’s an asshole, plain and simple.” “Well, then how’d you get to know him?” “Even assholes come in handy sometimes. You ever try to take a shit through your nose?”"

"If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are."

"“Compromise is necessary,” Max agreed, “so long as you never give up who you are. That isn’t compromise; that’s spiritual death. You have to remain true to yourself.”"

"Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?"

"The best artists know what to leave out. They know how much of the support should show through as the pigment is applied, what details aren’t necessary."

"You’re not a nun, are you? You haven’t taken one of those absurd vows that cut you off from what otherwise might be a full and healthy human existence?"

"“You’re confusing me.” “But not deliberately so,” Coyote says. “Let it go on record that any confusion arose simply because we lacked certain commonalities of reference.”"

"“The thing is,” Coyote says, “nothing’s as easy as we’d like it to be.” “Don’t I know it,” I mutter, but he’s not even listening to me. “And the real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place.”"

"By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged."

"I don't know why I care what people write about me after I'm dead, except that since I invest so much of my time telling the truth in my fiction, I'd hate to see someone play fast and loose with the pieces of my life. I don't care what they might think of me; but I don't want lies about my life used to invalidate the stories. My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn't have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own."

"When you’re invisible, no one can see that you’re different."

"I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?"

"One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled."

"I've always believed the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story."

"You can talk all you want about consensual reality, Jilly, but that doesn’t change the fact that some things are real and some things aren’t. There’s a line drawn between the two that separates reality from fantasy."

"He had seen trances before — wise men far in the east, who could feign death; a herbwife as she bent over her patient, searching for invisible hurts. But this was different. He could sense something here, within the circle cast by the light of the fire. A presence. Presences..."

"I've always had these bouts of depression; I hide them well but doesn't mean they aren't there. … I didn't have anyone around for whom I had to put on a cheerful mask. The thing with pretending you're in a good mood is that sometimes you can actually trick yourself into feeling better."

"That dichotomy between who she was and who she thought she should be was what really killed her."

"Why did men worship in churches, locking themselves away in the dark, when the world lay beyond its doors in all its real glory?"

"There are people who take the heart out of you, and there are people who put it back."

"I can remember the first time you told me about what the Church did to the mystery. The one they called Jesus – the Green Man they hung from a tree in the desert. How St. Paul took the mystery and twisted it to make a religion of intolerance and self-torment."

"They stood and listened, arms around each other for comfort, as the sound washed over them. It reverberated in the marrow of their bones, sung high and sweet, heartbreakingly mournful, quick as a jig, slow as the saddest air. Their hearts swelled with its beauty, its mystery. With all it revealed, and all that it hid."

"There are three kinds of kids: the ones that are the odd birds, the ones that pissed on them, and the ones that watched it happen."

"“Often,” he says, “what we take from the spirit world is only a reflection of what lies inside ourselves.”"

"She calls herself Tallulah, but I know who she really is. A name can’t begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that’s the magic of names, isn’t it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name."

"Everybody makes the same mistake. Fortune-telling doesn’t reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so that you can get a good look at it."

"The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it’s really a wheel."

"It’s the questions we ask, the journey we take to get to where we are going that’s more important than the actual answer. It’s good to have mysteries. It reminds us that there’s more to the world than just making do and having a bit of fun."

"Every big city like this is really two worlds. You could say it’s divided up between the haves and the have-nots, but it’s not that simple. It’s more like some people are citizens of the day and others of the night. Someone like me belongs to the night. Not because I’m bad, but because I’m invisible. People don’t know I exist."

"It was the old story, he realized. Everything, everybody wanted to lay claim to a piece of your soul. And if they couldn’t have it, they made you pay for it in guilt."

"Look, I’m sorry if I don’t measure up to how people want me to be, but this is just the way I am."

"I know that feeling all too well, but I broke the only pair of rose-colored glasses I had the chance to own a long time ago."

"Wisdom never comes to those who believe they have nothing left to learn."

"I had the same questions for Superman as I did for God: If he was so powerful, why didn’t he deal with some real problems? Why didn’t he stop wars, feed the starving in Ethiopia, cure cancer? At least God had the Church to do His PR work for Him — if you can buy their reasoning, they have any number of explanations ranging from how the troubles of this life build character to that inarguable catchall, “God’s will.” And the crap in this life sure makes heaven look good. When I was growing up, the writers and artists of Superman never even tried to deal with the problem. And since they didn’t, I could only see Superman as a monster, not a hero. I couldn’t believe his battles with criminals, superpowered geniuses and the like. I never believed in God either."

"She’s always so ready to believe anything that anyone tells her, so long as it’s magical. Well, I believe in magic, too, but it’s the magic that can turn a caterpillar into a butterfly, the natural wonder and beauty of the world that’s all around me. I can’t believe in some dreamland being real."

"I find that a lot of people have this thing about making crap romantic, the way they like to blur outlaws and heroes, the good with the bad."

"Those who live forever, who have no stake in the dance of death’s inevitable approach, can never understand the sanctity of life."

"“Who is he?” she asked. “Or maybe I should be asking what is he?” “I’ve always thought of him as a kind of anima, Jilly said. “A loose bit of myth that got left behind when all the others went on to wherever it is that myths go when we don’t believe in them anymore.”"

"It’s so much easier for most people to relate to a TV set than it is to another person. They get all this data fed into them, but they don’t know what to do with it anymore. When they talk to other people, it’s all surface. How ya doing, what about the weather. The only opinions they have are those that they’ve gotten from people on the TV. They think they’re informed, but all they’re doing is repeating the views of talk show hosts and news commentators."

"They’d met three years ago at a record launch party when Hilary had made a pass at her. Once they got past the fact that Zoe preferred men and wasn’t planning on changing that preference, they discovered that they had far too much in common not to be good friends."

"Time does more than erode a riverbank or wear mountains down into tired hills. It takes the edge from our memories as well, overlaying everything with a soft focus so that it all blurs together. What really happened gets all jumbled up with the hopes and dreams we once had and what we wish had really happened."

"“There’s stories and then there’s stories,” he said, interrupting her. “The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you’ve heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on, and the giving only makes you feel better. “The others are just words on a page.”"

"Do you know what fear stands for? Fuck Everything And Run."

"But music has its own enchantment and the first few notes of an old tune are all that it requires to transform any site into a place of magic, even if that location is no more than a windowless office cubicle in the old Firehall’s basement."

"As far as I’m concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary."

"In one form or another, it was one of the first implements created by ancient people to give voice to the mysteries that words cannot encompass, but that they had a need to express; only the drum was older."

"Creeps don’t need reasons for what they do; that’s why they’re creeps."