"The speaker in this case is a middle-aged witch, me." p. 1

"There was a day when all the animals talked to me." p. 11

"Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out." p. 17

"I am mother of the insane. Let me give you my children." p. 43

"Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed." p. 44

"Next there was a war that the king was due to lose." p. 49

"I was a professional, but you have saved me from the awful babble of that calling." p. 51

"The bird who cannot fly is left like a cockroach." p. 60

"My sisters, do you remember the fiddlers of your youth?" p. 67

"Long ago there was a strange deception: a wolf dressed in frills, a kind of transvestite." p. 76

"Let me take your pulse and...