...But if you want to be a good mayor—there seem to be so very few of them—that must be the sort of thing you have to be destined for. And a wish that goes against your destiny...that's always a bad idea.. Only a fool scoffs at destiny.' "'I think only a fool relies on it,' Julian grumbled. 'How can destiny decide what I'm going to be before I do?

There are more hidden spaces in a city, more hidden lives and hidden emptinesses, and more darkened windows where shadow people pass fleetingly in and out of sight.

There is the world you know, the world you have always known; and then you blink, and there is a place you never had any inkling of, and it spreads out across your eyescape. And then, most shockingly of all: there is the realization that these two places are one and the same. It turns out you never really knew the world around you at all. This is often the moment at which adventure begins.

But if home suddenly becomes not like home, what then?

Places, like people, are complex, and loving them isn't simple.

Every city, every town, hides beneath a certain amount of glamour that- either intentionally or not- can misdirect the eye or hide something worth finding. Learning to see through those glamours is part of the process of calling any place home.

Even places you know well can take on a touch of the unknown when you arrive there from a different direction.

Cities have the capability to at any moment shift out of the familiar, even if you've lived in one all your life.

You have to look at a thing long enough for it to really show itself to you...

Everyone know—or at least, was probably told as a child—that you can make a wish on a shooting star. Not everyone knows that the only way to be sure it will come ture is to speak it aloud before the star disappears, and this is a nearly imposssible fet to manage.