"What concern of mine are your affairs? Or Coren’s? What kind of peace would there be in me or in my house if I took interest in the wars and feuds that you weave in the courts below? I do not understand such things. I understand only what lies within my walls."

“He kissed her anyway, lightly on the cheek, before she turned to get her coat, thinking how long he had known her and how little he knew her and how little he knew of how much or little there was in her to know.”

“I was running from my own thoughts as much as anything. I simply wanted to untangle myself from the web I had touched. A single, sticky, quivering strand of it was all I needed to warn me away. I did not want to think about people. I wanted the trees, the scents and colors, the shifting shadows of the wood, which spoke a language I understood. I wished I could simply disappear in it, live like a bird or a fox through the winter, and leave the things I had glimpsed to resolve themselves without me.”

“Perhaps there had never been anything at all to see.”

“I didn’t know anymore what love meant, or why we were not all better off without it.”

“She lies like the moon lies, a different face every night, all but one of them false, and the one true face as barren and hard as stone. Why do you believe her?”

“I could not find my way back in dreams, I knew then. They were memory and desire, terror and hope; they told me only what I already knew.”