“Starbreeze doesn't rest, doesn't sleep and can hear anything carried on moving air. It'd make her the perfect spy, except that most of what she hears goes in one ear and out the other."I'm looking for a Precursor relic, a new one""What's a relic?" Starbreeze said curiously."A powerful magical thing. It would have been found a week or two ago""What's a week?”

“Other mages have an odd attitude towards diviners. By the standards of, say, elemental mages. We can't gate, we can't attack, we can't shield, and when it comes to physical action our magic is about as useful as a bicycle in a trampolining contest. But we can see anywhere and learn anything and there's no secret we can't uncover if we try hard enough. So when an elemental mage looks at a diviner, the elemental mage knows he could take him in a straight fight with no more effort that it would take to tie his shoes. On the other hand, the elemental mage also knows that the diviner could find out every one of his most dirty and embarrassing secrets and, should hi feel like it, post copies of them to everyone the elemental mage has ever met. It creates a mixture of uneasiness and contempt that doesn't encourage warm feelings. There's a reason most of my friends aren't mages.”

“I've heard of a guy in Chicago who advertises in the phone book under "Wizard",though that's probably a urban legend.”

“I don’t like keeping her in the dark,” Jace said.“We’ll tell her in a week. What difference does a week make?”Jace gave him a look. “Two weeks ago you were dead.”“Well, I wasn’t suggesting two weeks,” said Sebastian. “That would be insane.”

“I shook off my numbness. I opened the door and went into the other bedroom. Two little figures stood on the bed. One had a shirt over his head which Mike was trying to pull past his ears. "Here," I said, "you've got to unbutton another button." "Then you'd have to take the whole thing off," he protested. "There are time when it pays to start all over again, and this is one of them.”

“How strange it must be, thought Tortoise looking out to sea, to have no edge to one's world. We have a beach; we know the shape of our island and just how far we can go. But Turtle can swim away in any direction and keep going -- her world has no limits, no ending. She can, if she chooses, swim on forever and ever and ever.”

“The true defining situation for a person is what they do when they are alone and don't have to do anything else. What do they do? Do they do frivolous things? That's when you define what you are.”