Your life is not a tragedy. It’s history, and it’s yours.

When the rest of the mind has fled, sometimes there’s music left.

It’s more like ... she has grown too big and feels trapped in her own skin.

She wanted to talk about it, to tell the peasants in the fields and the nobles in their palashos—the cows in the pastures, the very birds in the air— that everything was nothing.It was a delightful thought because it meant (to Tess) that one was free to choose, or decline to choose, without shame or coercion. For someone who was nothing, anything was possible.

I think I can show them the path out. I understand now that it’s not a question of faith or hope; it exists, and we can find it. It’s going to take some time, though.

She was the river, and the river had nothing to be ashamed of.

Love and guilt are like ham and eggs. So many people enjoy them together, but there’s no rule saying you must have one with the other. They don’t even come from the same animal.

All roads were one, surely, even if their textures differed.Was she as varied, a part of herself as rough and tutted as the Goreddi roads, and some other part as efficient as the Ninysh? She often felt, early in the morning, when the world seemed most malleable, that she contained these potentials, and more.It wasn’t merely that she could be anything, but that she was everything, all at once.

One thing I’ve learned about grief: it’s like a creditor’s bill. You can put off paying, but it eventually falls due, and exacts usurious interest.