In the uttermost extremity, abandoned by all who should have protected her, she’d found that she need not abandon herself. A powerful lesson. A dangerous lesson.

Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.

Talking to the gods had been a much more comfortable proposition when there had seemed no danger of Their talking back.

The gods have no hands in this world but ours. Hand to hand to hand…

“Heaven weeps, but free will is sacred. The meaning of yes is created by the ability to say no. As a forced marriage is no marriage, but instead the crime of rape. The gods either will not or cannot rape our souls; in any case, They do not. To my knowledge,” the meticulous scholar in him added.

“Neither could I have imagined me. So perhaps we should not be so sure of our future fate, either. What we don’t know of it is vastly larger than what we do, and will surely not stop surprising us.”