Polly

“Lucy picked up her skirts and danced down the hall to her own door. “I’m going to run away to Ireland!” she yelled. Cassandra followed after her. “Haven’t the Irish suffered enough?” “Maybe a pirate will kidnap me. If I’m lucky.” “If we’re all lucky.”
― Mia Vincy, A Wicked Kind of Husband

“I suppose that in general I am not a contrary sort of person,” she said, her voice muffled.

  His eyes were narrowed; he was making no attempt to disguise the fact that he really wanted to peer inside her soul. “And yet you are the daughter of a sweela man,” he murmured. “You cannot be as tame as you appear. There must be passion in you that can be roused by something . There must be something you would fight for, or against.”

  “I am a woman of water,” she replied. “I am more likely to slip away in stealth than to blaze up in wrath.”

  He looked dissatisfied. “All men and women have a little wood and bone in them. Somewhere, from some ancestor. Something that will not back down. Something that will not give way.”

  She turned her right hand palm up and studied the faint lines. “There must be bone in me somewhere, or I could not hold my shape,” she said. “But these days all I can feel is blood.”
― Sharon Shinn, Troubled Waters

“I had had a chance to get to know her, and in doing so began to understand the kind of person she was. In a word, she was complicated. If things were going her way, she was fine. If anything out of the ordinary occurred – anything that conflicted with what she wanted to do, and in her way – then you were frozen out and left to stew until she decided to invite you back into the fold. The freeze could last days or even weeks, and no-one was immune.”
― Dickie Arbiter, On Duty with the Queen

“Let me explain, Mrs. DeWitt, how marriage works.” “Oh, please do, Mr. DeWitt, I’m all agog.” “I am the husband, so I make the rules to suit me.” “And I am the wife, so I change the rules to suit me.”
― Mia Vincy, A Wicked Kind of Husband