“Sophie did not care to think how Howl might react if Fanny woke him by stabbing him with her parasol.”

“We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”

“You give her all your french fries, even when she won't give you back onion rings,' Sophie says. 'And when you say her name it sounds different.'

How?'

Sophie thinks. 'Like it's covered with blankets.”

“These gentry did not want him [the labourer's lad] to know; they did not want him to think; they only wanted him to work. To toil with the hand was what he was born into the world for, and they took precious good care to see that he did it from his youth upwards.”

“By now it was clear that Howl was in a mood to produce green slime any second. Sophie hurriedly put her sewing away. "I'll make some hot buttered toast," she said. "Is that all you can do in the face of tragedy??" Howl asked. "Make toast!”

“I don't think she realized how much she cared for him, or he for her, until the end. Hasn't someone said a woman may be known by the men who love her enough to die for her? (If they haven't, I claim the credit myself.)”

“It made him feel indispensable and needed - even if the fact that Jocelyn didn't appear to care wheather he slept in her daughter's bed or not did underscore that Clary's mother apparently regarded him as about sexually threatening as a goldfish.”

“But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true.”

“He had to keep thinking of them because if he forgot them and did not think of them they might forget about him. And he had to keep hoping.”

“Fate slew him, but he did not drop;
She felled—he did not fall—
Impaled him on her fiercest stakes—
He neutralized them all.

She stung him, sapped his firm advance,
But, when her worst was done,
And he, unmoved, regarded her,
Acknowledged him a man.”