Quotes from Megan Chance

Dozens. I've been drawing them forever. It was a way to—" I stopped, surprised that I'd almost said the truth about my mother and what these drawings had meant, about the future I'd been promised, my loneliness and need.

You care very deeply for your family, don't you, Miss Kimble?" "They're everything to me," I said simply. "They saved me,

So close. Yet not close enough that either had mentioned the other to her family—even to the point that my mother had not included her sister in her story of the Exposition. My

A ghost. Smoke and dust and shadow. Nothing substantial until I chose to be, and when I did, no one would ever underestimate me again.

me. It was then that I understood her silence about my snooping had been deliberate. She was my ally, but in what, exactly, I had no idea.

I leaned my head back, and waited for the sunrise.

I thought I knew everything. There's the challenge fate loves best, isn't it? I was ripe for a fall and so … the apple.

In the end, for me, there was only this: desire and addiction and hunger, a craving that made the world look hard-edged and brutally lovely.

They were the words she'd waited her entire life for, words of acceptance, of love, and Imogene knew this was finally her chance to hear them, her chance to be the daughter her father had always wanted, the daughter he'd lost when Chloe died. This time, she wouldn't fail. Not this time.

understand what part they played. Symmetry. And because I understood that, I understood that a single painting or composition or poem might change the future. Where its influence might end—if it ever did—was a mystery. I had spent lifetimes watching the effects of my choices, and so I knew that Joseph Hannigan was meant to be the very best of them. The world had put him into my hands; I could only guess at its design. But I knew he

Let me show you what I know of it," he murmured. "Your mouth can be considered a hundred ways. Rico would look at it and he would see the light and shade; Byron Sawyer would see the color; yet another artist might see the line. A hundred truths, and not one is wrong. There are no original ideas, darling, only original visions. Each of us would draw your lips a different way, yet none of us could capture the complete essence of them.

He wished he knew how they did it. Even planning for the next day was beyond his capabilities. He didn't understand how to think that way, how to plan, and he wanted to. He wanted to understand how people mapped out their lives, how they went so easily through a day. How they managed to keep from destroying the people around them, destroying themselves. He looked down at his arm, at the too-smooth stump, the thick pink ridge of scar. Christ, how did they do it? How did Genie do it?

Answers? Ha, he would say that. More like riddles, mazes, labyrinths. If there's some power trying to show me the way, it should give better directions.

It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen. —Aristotle, Poetics, XXV

Omnia Mundi Fumus et Umbra All in the World is Smoke and Shadow –Latin motto

every melody and harmony felt part of some vast universe that belonged not just to man, but to every other creature—worldly and otherworldly.

It wasn't just her words, it was her way of putting them together, the voice that seemed to gain power with each one, so that my head had been filled with images so magically vibrant it was as if I had seen them with my own eyes. She changed the world into something fine. She made one believe.

The two of you made something so beautiful it changed the way I saw it. I'll never think of those places the same way again.

Then I saw it. Little pins of light that grew larger as I watched, a city that seemed to bloom from the darkness, spreading and spreading so that I couldn't tell what was real and what was only reflection.

We have always found your mortal insistence on certainties strange. Nothing is as clear as you wish it to be. You have walked your path blindly until now. Time to open your eyes.

music told me that whatever else had been taken from me, my soul remained.

We do not stay as we were born, none of us." I poured a glass of wine. "We are all made. And this—what I am—was nothing but one more choice in a sea of choices.

There is no meaning. Only balance. Only symmetry.

She was Venice personified, with her immortal agelessness and her beautiful, mysterious eyes that promised deliverance and salvation, her mouth that had spoken a hundred promises. All of them lies.