“Is it more childish and foolish to insist that there is a conspiracy or that there is not?”

“A plague of ennui afflicted London's many prophets. Warning signs were discarded, pamphlets pulped, megaphones thrown into cupboards. Those who could count questionable presences insisted that even since the Architeuthis had disappeared, something new had been walking. Something driven and intense and intent on itself. And since shortly after that, it had unfolded again and become something a little more itself, emerged from a pupa of unspecificity into sentience, a obsessive moment of now that trod heavy in time.No, they didn't really know what that mean, either, but that was their very strong impression. And it was freaking them out.”

“Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.”

“The dead are way more organized than the living.”

“And the continual non-up-turnance of so valuable a commodity as a giant squid—the thought of getting their alembics on which made the city’s alchemists whine like dogs—was provoking more and more interest from London’s repo-men and -women.”

“A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?”

“Standing there on his new perch, Sham was overwhelmingly bored of feeling overwhelmed. The more he worked, he realized, the quicker he worked.”