Love is a luxury.""No. Love is an element."An element. Like air to breathe, earth to stand on.

I'm afraid they're in love," he said, concerned. "They don't want to leave you." He lifted one hand from her waist to gently brush a pair from her neck, where their wings fanned against her jaw. Melancholy, he said, "I know just how they feel.

What a lovely display of personhood. He's like a good book cover that grabs your gaze. Read me. I'm fun but smart. You won't be able to put me down.

Around Mik, my powers desert me. I lose basic motor function, like my brain focuses all neural activity on my lips and shifts into kiss preparedness mode way too early, to the detriment of things like speech, and walking.

Once upon a time there was a silence that dreamed of becoming a song, and then I found you, and now everything is music.

And they were quiet but their blood and nerves and butterflies were not—they were rampantly alive, rushing and thrumming in a wild and perfect melody, matched note for note.

It's like all my life I've been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I'm not a tower at all. I'm a lighthouse. It's like waking up. I am incandescent.

it’s like . . . finding a book inside another book. A small treasure of a book hidden inside a big common one—like . . . spells printed on dragonfly wings, discovered tucked inside a cookery book, right between the recipes for cabbages and corn. That’s what a kiss is like, he thought, no matter how brief: It’s a tiny, magical story, and a miraculous interruption of the mundane.

Allí, junto a Akiva, incluso mientras hablaban de guerra, ciudades sitiadas y enemistad duradera, se sentía atraída hacia su inmensidad y calidez, como si fuera al mismo tiempo lugar y persona, y, contra cualquier lógica, exactamente donde se suponía que ella debía estar.