“Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.”

“It's been open about a year now.And it is one of my favorite places in the city.""You never told me," he said, sounding surprised."So even after all these years,we can still surprise one another," she teased.He leaned over and kissed her quickly on the cheek. "Even after all these years," he said. "So enlighten me-how often do you come to this place?""Five,maybe six times a week.""Oh?""Every morning when I'd leave the shop,I'd usually walk down to the Embarcadero,amble along the promenade and end up walking the length of this pier.Where did you think I was for that hour?""I thought you'd popped across the road for coffee.""Yea,Nicholas," Perenelle said in French. "I drink tea. You know I hate coffee.""You hate coffee?" Nicholas said. "Since when?""Only for the last eighty years or so."Nicholas blinked,pale eyes reflecting the blue of the sea. "I knew that.I think.""You're teasing me.""Maybe," he admitted.”

“For years after my father left us for Belladonna, I had looked for him... the last time someone had seen them, they were living on a duck's back.”

“After years of searching, I finally found love. I found it in the unlikeliest of places: My best friend’s bed, right after he leaves for work every morning.”

“I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.”

“I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure, in time, until I spent most of my hours searching for such books. Then I devised a plan of study for myself, tracing obscure sciences, one after another, from the dawn of knowledge to the present. Eventually I exhausted even that, and beginning at the great ebony case that stands in the center of the room we of the library have maintained for three hundred years against the return of the Autarch Sulpicius (and into which, in consequence, no one ever comes) I read outward for a period of fifteen years, often finishing two books in one day.”