“My parents danced together, her head on his chest. Both had their eyes closed. They seemed so perfectly content. If you can find someone like that, someone who you can hold and close your eyes to t...”

“I have known her longer, my smile said. True, you have been inside the circle of her arms, tasted her mouth, felt the warmth of her, and that is something I have never had. But there is a part of h...”

“There are so many men, all endlessly attempting to sweep me off my feet. And there is one of you, trying just the opposite. Making sure my feet are firm beneath me, lest I fall.”

“Denna is a wild thing," I explained. "Like a hind or a summer storm. If a storm blows down your house, or breaks a tree, you don't say the storm was mean. It was cruel. It acted according to its na...”

“Sought we the Scrivani word-work of SurthurLong-lost in ledger all hope forgotten.Yet fast-found for friendship fair the book-bringerHot comes the huntress Fela, flushed with findingBreathless her ...”

“It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own...”

“Miri took genuine comfort in studying Mathematics that day. She could sort numbers into two simple ideas: true and not true. Unlike numbers, words were rarely just one thing. They moved and changed...”

“Oh! Science! Everything has been revised. For the body and for the soul,--the viaticum,there are medicine and philosophy,old wives' remedies and popular songs rearranged. And the pastimes of prince...”

“Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.”

“If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”