She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit… - John Crowley

She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head.

"I used to think, in Belaire, that maybe you had gone to live with the List, and it hadn't suited you, and that one spring they'd bring you home dead. From homesickness. I saw how you would look, pale and sad."

"I did die," she said. "It was easy."

There aren't many now who leave from the same world they were born into. Not here, not anywhere on earth as far as I can tell or know; the simplest and most unchanging of human societies have been shattered in the last hundred years, people flung into centrifuges of change and loss, that there comes to be nothing at last to say good-bye to. I was leaving the world, but it was not my world I was leaving

A streak of presence surrounded by a dim glow of absence.