“A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.”

“To whole room her eyes are numb,
As she reads from a true love story.
From the pages of a book her lover comes,
Her heart bleeds, it's a true love story.”

“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”

“When she came to write her story, she would wonder when the books and the words started to mean not just something, but everything.”

“Our minds work alike, she thought. She had found her partner, her equal, the one to work and live and love with her. Her soulmate.”

“She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.”

“she tapped her finger and nothing happened and she thought she had lost her magic, but it had only changed and it took her awhile to figure it out.”

““I thought I would be safe here.”
“You are.” For the first time, he touched her, touched her hand. “Safe from everything but paper and ink. Please. Put those down.”
“Paper and ink.” She clutched the books to her ample chest. “They’re not nothing, Alec. They’re pretty much everything to me: the embodiment of ideas, of thought—of free and open thought. Of inquiry and supposition. All of it.””

“She carried a knife inside of herself now, one that was always cutting her. She could feel it every time she swallowed, every time her thoughts strayed from the splendor of the wild.”

“Sketches indeed, from that most passionate page,
A woman's heart, of feelings, thoughts, that make
The atmosphere in which her spirit moves;”