“She'd never seen a monster like that before, had never heard of one in all the Lore. When she grappled with the question of what it was, her sharply honed scientifical mind deduced one answer: manbearpig.”

“How could she know what she wanted to do with her life? All these years she thought she'd be a healer like Mama, and now she knew it was never going to happen.”

“She had never experienced the pain of unsatisfied desire before. It hurt. It hurt like nothing she'd ever felt, and there seemed to be no remedy.”

“As she stumbled forward she cried out in her mind, which was as dark, as shaken as the subterranean vault, “Forgive me. O my Masters, O unnamed ones, most ancient ones, forgive me, forgive me!”
There was no answer. There had never been an answer.”

“All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.”

“Borders I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.”

“She thought of something her mother had told her when she'd finally broken up with one of her most dysfunctional boyfriends.”

“Puck laughed, and it wasn't like that weird high-pitched giggle she'd heard out of children before, the one that begged the question: why would one possibly tickle a child just to elicit that noise?”

“No one else knew how she'd longed for extinction, how much part of her had hungered simply to quit. To end. She'd once intended, coldly and logically, to do just that… She'd sacrificed her naval career… and a corner of her mind suspected she'd actually wanted to sacrifice it — that she'd planned to use the loss of the vocation she loved so much as one more reason to end her dreary existence. It had seemed only reasonable then; now the memory was one more coal of contempt for her own weakness, her willingness to surrender to her own pain when she'd always refused to surrender to anyone else.”

“But would she do it differently if she could? She doubted it. Her experiences growing up ad formed her into the woman that she'd become, just as his experiences had formed him, and she didn't regret them. And yet…she knew that wasn't the question that mattered. …she realized the choice before her was this: Where do I go from here?
It is never too late to change things.”