Don't forget. Always, somewhere, someone is fighting for you. As long as you remember her, you are not alone.

People get built different. We don’t need to figure it out. We just need to respect it.

Because someone like her doesn’t understand – she could never truly understand – what it means to love, and to be loved in turn.

Help us, Erik. Cave one. It’s the right thing to do. We are all dead and you are too late. But you’ll come anyway, won’t you? Because you’re a fool. You’re my dancing little fool. Come to die for the dead.

You can live wherever you want to live. Be whoever you want to be. You have time.

What? No one’s ever said that to you? David. You’re a strong boy. You’re the strongest boy grandma’s ever seen!

Do all lovers feel they're inventing something? I know the gestures. I imagined it all, waiting for you.

Fear, she said. What are we so afraid of? Why do we let ’em tell us we’re afraid? What is it they’re afraid of?” She picked up the stocking she had been darning, turned it in her hands, was silent awhile; finally she said, “What are they afraid of us for? Tenar spun and did not answer.

I won’t hesitate any longer.

I believe he considers crying either evil or shameful. Even when he was very ill and weak, the first days of our escape, he hid his face from me when he wept. Reasons personal, racial, social, sexual—how can I guess why Ai must not weep? Yet his name is a cry of pain.

We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.

I can reach back in there and unbend and rebend everything like Nordstrom’s wire hangers and make it rehappen the way it always should have. Put Hawaii back. Refreeze the pack ice. Bring back jazz. Make my brother love me again.

But that moment... alone, in the grey dawn, before a pondful of dead fish, knowing that I was seen, and understanding that all things in this world were connected? That was the first time in my life I knew what terror really was. The first time I truly believed in you, my river.

Oh Himu, I am alive. I want to be alive, I want to want things, I want so much. I choose to live.

It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?

“I can’t even imagine it,” she said, finally. “To be part of something so big, for so long, and then suddenly to be so completely alone.”

I admire that in you. In my loneliness, I got angry and turned to bad things, but in your loneliness, you turned to creativity. I think that's beautiful. I really do.

“My heart is a fish.” Tisarwat’s voice thin and breathy. A shallow gasp. “Hiding in the water-grass.” Another. “In the green.” “Well, that one’s all right,” Nine admitted. “Though it does get stuck in my head something fierce.”

Water has everything to do with change—in virtually every culture it’s a symbol of change. In Shakespeare… water is symbolic in terms of crossing a rubicon, and of transformation. In a lot of cultures it’s where you go to meet the gods, because they come out of water.

But you’re young. Everyone you let into your heart will leave a seed in the soil there.

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.

Name a day, name an hour, in which Arthur Less was not afraid.

I remember seeing things get smaller as I grew colossal, pulling myself tight, becoming overgrown, splitting my body into cliffs and canyons, and I remember fog, I wanted fog so badly and I could never get it right.

Nona had never seen anyone so sad in her whole short life. It made her nearly afraid to die. “Nobody locks me up anywhere,” said Kiriona.

In solitude, I felt the liberty you spoke of. But I also felt your absence.

Oh, Kal’mera Broun in the flesh. Languid and disloyal and unambitious as ever. You know, I haven't been able to act, but I have been able to see. I've been able to see so much, nearly everything. Every quiet moment, every little argument. Tell me, why have you given up your name?

I crave to walk on the mountain, the mountain of Gont, in the forests, in the autumn when the leaves are bright. There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no act or art or power can teach me, what I have

If it’s for someone you love…how you feel about others doesn’t matter. You keep lying to yourself for as long as it takes.

The Traveler needs a story. You're the story.

I believe against it all in Millennium Break. My name was Gur Sevraq, and I have been stolen from you. But you will win anyway. You must.

I never stop thinking about you. How things could have been. How you could have taken me with you.

We’re young enough to believe it should hurt this much.

Who are you kidding? You could never retire. You’re gonna be up on that stage until you die. At 109. And I’m the same way. I can’t turn it off either. And nothing matters more, even if it should.

There is no me, without you. One flesh, one end.

She remembers gunning down her brother, her father, brilliant as a nuclear blast. The rest of her childhood has been corrected down to darkness.

Because I am the Rose Bride...because I am a doll with no heart... I thought that no matter what befell my body, my heart wouldn't feel the pain.

You can't quit being the Rose Bride, can you?

My bodies sweated under my uniform jackets, and, bored, I opened three of my mouths, all in close proximity to each other on the temple plaza, and sang with those three voices, “My heart is a fish, hiding in the water-grass…”

This is why I chose to write about the problem of powerful stories. They work. Our world is full of them, and they continue to propagate forward. We must confront them.

My love, my queen, kuye lam, I am a part of you forever, but I was born to rule high wilderness, to guard my people and defy my foe. If I could answer these questions of empire and complicity for you, would I love and need you so much?

The Pink Opaque was a tv show. We watched it in your basement on Saturday nights from 10:30 to 11:00. Remember? The last show before the Young Adult Network switched to black and white reruns for the night. Yeah. But are you sure? Are you sure that's all it was?

Every family is kind of cultlike, has their way of doing things and positions themselves in opposition to the rest of the world.

So, I will. I do, I do. I kiss her.

The Cryptarch’s Qualm. Your power is secret, and in secret it is total. To use your power you must touch the world. To touch you must be touched, to be touched is to be seen, to be seen is to be known. To be known is to perish.…

That was progression, too, for Svir. A shift in how you relate to the world. The recognition that other people aren’t just on the beach with you; that they make the beach with you. That you are the beach. That you are always at least the edge of the other.

She felt like she had spent a very long time fumbling with a knot. “You’ve gone away again,” Xe said, from below, “haven’t you?”

My name is Morning’s Observation and I’m here to change what you think about milk.

It was her, Grace. The glow on the bank. The pull from the trees. She's not of this place.

“Horrors,” said Elphaba. It was her first word, and it was greeted with silence. Even the moon, a lambent bowl among the trees, seemed to pause.”

“Truly trim is real,” Tau breathed. “Truly the universe is ruled by the connections between people.”