Quotes from Cynthia Voigt

Fear lay down on top of her like a black cloud, trying to get into her mouth through her clenched teeth. There was nothing she could do but wait, and hope that the danger – a danger she couldn't even lift her head to meet – might not notice the little boat, drifting helpless through the fog.

She went on and on, until Jeff had a sense of family spreading out around them endlessly, and only an hour later, when she was lost in reminiscences, did he understand that the names she mentioned, the people she spoke of, were most of them long ago dead. The family spread not out and around, but back, back into time.

Secrets, he had learned, were the very soil that sorrows grew most easily out of.

I don't know what she told you, but I never was sorry I'd married her or loved her because of you. You always made a difference, made a real difference, from the very beginning. I always knew that, inside me, but I didn't bother to learn how to show you. I'm sorry, Jeff, I should have taken the trouble.

He felt […] as if he'd just gotten a letter, out of the blue, from somebody wise enough to know the truth, from everybody, or at least everybody who mattered. "Hello," the letter said. "Hello, Jeff Greene, I've been watching you and I like you and I want to know you better. This is just to say I'm glad you're alive in the world." The list of signatures, he thought, would include his own.

Some secrets were so dangerous that they should never be kept.

How can something get you thinking the wrong way, if you know how to think the right way?' Sammy asked.

Poor Melody, he thought again, because she saw love as something that gets you what you want. She didn't understand at all.

Panic, he was discovering, is not the best soil to grow clear thinking out of.

Ideas, he knew from experience, arrived in their own good time, dressed exactly the way they wanted to be and saying only as much as they felt like.

Brother, even when you're on the track you aren't running on the track, don't you know that yet?

What he was doing, creeping through the world like a thief – where he was going to, in secrecy – what he might be fleeing from – those questions also she didn't know the answer to. But she did know that only the Lords went beardless.

She thought it might have been his thought that wakened her, as he crept toward the solitary holding; she thought that the danger in his thoughts had reached out to awaken her as surely as an alarm bell ringing out across the night.

Fear burned through him, like a flame. Fear coursed through him, like icy water. He threw his head back and raised his dagger, to strike -- and cried out wordlessly, as if the great cry could gather all his fear together and set its swelling course behind him, to add it to his strength.

On this road they saw some other men, fishers and farmers Elske was told; some of the men were accompanied by women whose hair was wrapped around with colored cloths. These men and women stared at Elske, in her fur boots and wolfskin cloak, but when she stared back and them they looked away.

He knew it was perfect, and perfectly beautiful. He thought about how much she would like it. When he thought like that, happiness swelled up warm within him.

And so I was. I can put on the cloak of the world I find myself in, however I happen to find myself in it. I can sing any man's tune, and you'd believe me. That's my gift." Birle knew this wasn't a gift he honored.

Whatever Blithe wanted, she wanted absolutely and immediately. There was no budging Blithe.

In the white, warmless light of the moon, his people's fear rose up like a tide towards Malke, and it seemed to Oriel that the King drank in that fear, as if it were wine to give him strength and rejoicing.

No fish were biting. Not that morning. She heard James calling her with panic in his voice. Slowly, she trudged back to her family. "I told you," Sammy said to James, "because the fishing line was

On a bright Sunday morning in the early years of the last century

She sat with her back to her fear, as to the wind and waves. Fear blew and sprayed at her back but she dared not turn around to face it.

There was something that hurt him in the way the hills rose so gently from the broad, rich southern plain. Something painful in the lazy curves of the river, golden under a sinking sun, shadowed by the trees that grew along its edges.

If they were afloat on the sea, and blind in the fog — they didn't even know what direction they should turn in. What then did it matter that she knew reading and writing, or that he had been caught out in a plot against his overlord?