“It was much easier for him now that he was smaller to negotiate his way through his crammed shop but he still tried to swagger past the shelves like he used to in the past. The attempt looked so strange that Scipio started to mimic him behind his back. "What's the silly giggling about?" Barbarossa asked when Prosper and Renzo bust out laughing.”

“Dustfinger inspected his reddened fingers and felt the taut skin. ‘He might tell me how my story ends,’ he murmured. Meggie looked at him in astonishment. ‘You mean you don’t know?’ Dustfinger smiled. Meggie still didn’t particularly like his smile. It seemed to appear only to hide something else. ‘What’s so unusual about that, princess?’ he asked quietly. ‘Do you know how your story ends?’ Meggie had no answer for that.”

“Unlike me, he realized that Dustfinger would do anything in return for such a promise. All he wants is to go back to his own world. He doesn't even stop to ask if his story there has a happy ending!""Well, that's no different from real life," remarked Elinor gloomily. "You never know if things will turn out well. Just now our own story looks like it's coming to a bad end.”

“The tent in which she first met him had smelled of blood, of the death she did not understand, and still she had thought of it all as a game. She had promised him the world. His flesh in the flesh of his enemies. And much too late had she realized what he had sown in her. Love. Worst of all poisons.”

“For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his last punishment, let the flames of hell consume him for ever.Curse on book thieves, from the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain”

“The night breathed through the apartment like a dark animal. The ticking of a clock. The groan of a floorboard as he slipped out of his room. All was drowned by its silence. But Jacob loved the night. He felt it on his skin like a promise. Like a cloak woven from freedom and danger.”

“He flung his arms around her neck, but only once he saw Silvertoungue's back was turned. He never knew with fathers. "I'll save him, Meggie!" he wispered in her ear. "I'll bring Dustfinger back. This story will have a happy ending.I swear!”