The Trees

Among the many fox magics her sobo had delighted in describing, the one that had most captured her imagination was the power to alter form. The most eldritch among foxes could turn (or so her grandmother would claim in that musical croak that was her storytelling voice) into human beings. The they would creep into the lives of lonely and impressionable souls and offer them long-sought affection.

...it's survival of the fittest, not the strongest or the biggest.

The proposal thus surmounted, it had seemed to him that the hard work was over, and that all that remained was to live out their lives in wedded bliss.

Sometimes, just when she thought Seb was made out of wires and circuit boards, he came up with ideas so romantic that she wanted to throw her arms around him and bury a kiss in his hair. Were he only her little boy again, the one he had been not so many years ago, she would have done so there and then.

You can’t wait for the world to be perfect before you start living in it.