“He[Tom] read from the Almenak."'The song that the Vigil Snake sings is in fact one immensely long word; the longest in the ancient language of the species. It is so long that an individual can sing it for a lifetime and never come to the end of it.'""That sounds like a Kleppism to me," Geneva said. "How would they ever learn it?""Good question," said Tom. "Maybe they're born with it, like a migration instinct?"'"Born with a song,"said Geneva.Tom smiled. "Yes. Don't you like that idea?""Liking it and having it be true aren't the same thing, Tom.""Huh. Sometimes you need to let things strike your heart and not your head, Geneva.”

“I will say it one last time: Demonation! The feeling of it! There are no words -how can there be?- to describe what it feels like to become words, to feel your life encoded, and laid out in black ink on white paper. All my love and hatred, melted into words. It was like the End of the World.”

“I'm an inclusionist. I've always divided up (very, very broadly, I admit) the artistic instincts into the inclusionist and the exclusionist. The exclusionist is Raccine. The inclusionist is Shakespeare. I've always felt like I'd prefer to throw 45 things into the pot and hope that maybe 36 of them will taste good. You may choke on 9 of them. I'd rather do that than only have half that number of elements and each one perfect. That's because I know that people choke on different things.... I think that when I was a kid, the experience of things, the experience of just finding words for things, of finding somebody else's world and being able to leap into it and, like any world, you pick up the geography instantly. You expected the thing to unfold, you expected there to be valleys that upon entering that world you were barely aware of. For me a novel, particularly a large novel, one you put down at the end and think, 'Hell, that was interesting. I'm not sure I understood Chapters X, Y and Z, but maybe next time I read it or talk to someone about it, I will'... that's a very different experience to the immaculately formed, beautifully honed, finished 'art' thing.”

“Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him."Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her."It takes a man with real heart"—he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest—"to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”

“Then we realized that your Kind like to make laws. Like to decree what's what, and whether it's good or not. And the world, being a loving thing, and not wishing to disappoint you or distress you, indulges you. Behaves as though your doctrines are in some way absolute.”

“People are like books. Everywhere they're opened, they're read.”

“(...) An amalgam of sexual excess and demonic elegance, as likely to fuck you as tear out your heart.”