“Could it have been anyone, or was it destiny? When I'm considering this I find it helpful to quote the wisdom of my father, who once told me, "Who knows why the fuck anything happens?”

“I looked into the literature on this," said Nightingale, "and it wasn't very helpful.""There's a literature about this?""You'd be amazed, Constable, about what there's a literature on.”

“I've already told the police what happened, they didn't believe me. Why should you,' he said.'Because we're the people that believe people that other people don't believe,' I said.'How can I know t...”

“Can you sacrifice people?' I asked. 'Take their magic that way?''Yes,' he said. 'But there's a catch.''What's the catch?''You get hunted down even unto the ends of the Earth and summarily executed.”

“Fuck me, I thought. I can do magic.”

“I did feel a 'something', like a catch in the silence at the moment of creation.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”

“She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.”

“For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

“He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.”