Music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of mind. - Guy Gavriel Kay

Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.

Ned found that if he thought about things like that too much, the accident of it all, his mind started down unsettling paths.…
Could you make a pattern out of any of this? Stitch together the seeming randomness into something that had meaning? Is that what life was about, he wondered: trying to make that pattern, to have things make sense?

Home was a dream she’d had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea.