“She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was incomparable richness in it.”

“I have heard that Glinda is a beautiful woman, who knows how to keep young in spite of the many years she has lived.”

“Should any other person or governing body be able to tell another person that he/she cannot save their own life, because it would be a violation of a law?”

“In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious. … The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person's skin had burned off.”

“I want to know how many years I got.”

“Knowledge accumulates over time; it’s not just one person or one set of time but over many hundreds of years. That gives me hope.”

“She had loved him for such a long time, she thought. How was it that she did now know him at all?”

“Perhaps he's in love with Agatha," she said.
"I hope not. I intend to marry Agatha myself. She may be a thousand years old, but she makes an incomparable jam tart. Beauty fades, but cooking is eternal.”

“I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.”

“Her voice is surprisingly rich for a girl in her early teens, and she has more personality than many pop starlets her age, especially those in the Disney stable.”