Bowie thought he would like to be kind, too. He’d been merciful to Susannah. He had not killed her. But mercy was not the same thing as kindness. As gentleness

He thought of the wardrobe again, how the moths escaped when the door was opened. How afraid Avelot had been of them. Bowie wished he could tell her to rejoice instead. They had been born in transformative darkness, eaten their fill of beauty in their teeming company, and then they had been freed

Once she had been a statue of Mary Kenner, one of Maryanne Gorch’s more controversial commissions when it was discovered that her notable contribution to humanity was the invention of the sanitary belt (but does that really merit a statue, said one of the men on the panel, the other arguing it wasn’t really something you wanted to celebrate even if

Bogomil said, “What I am to Anabin and Anabin is to me is none of your concern. What he was, and what he is, and what he will be, you see only the smallest part. But even that smallest part is dear to me. You think you are interesting and Anabin is not because you are young and stupid and you do not know the value of anything yet. But if you are

He wished he could be a fox again. But foxes could be hunted and killed. He thought, I will be water. No one will think to look for me in the ocean, and if they did bother to come and look, they would never find me

Not that Mo thought he would be any good at revenge. But maybe no one was, at the beginning

The woman opened a wardrobe where a white dress hung like the moon on a peg

Even if there were a lot of other things I wanted you to tell them and you remembered all of it correctly, it could still turn out something was the wrong thing for me to say. That’s the problem with being someone’s mother. You try to be helpful but it may turn out you were saying the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong time, most of the time

Bowie put the song into the heads of every infant in the NICU. He impressed the pattern into their dreams. They would know the song all their lives without ever knowing how they knew it. One day many years from now, some would have children of their own and they would sing the song to their children, and in this way the song would replicate itself.