“I swam across the torrent of my madness, and pulled myself upon the shore of a new and better sanity.”

“Why don’t we give her a crumb or two of that?""For the same reason that I do not try to pull a thread free from a cobweb and use it to darn my socks," growled Grandible. "Pull on a thread, and you pull on the whole web. And then out come the spiders . . .”

“Everybody knew that books were dangerous. Read the wrong book, it was said, and the words crawled around your brain on black legs and drove you mad, wicked mad.”

“At first only Tamarind had noticed the awkward, disquieting way his expressions changed, as if a puppeteer were pulling wires to move his face muscles, and doing it rather badly. Nowadays she saw the fear in everybody’s eyes. Her brother was going out of tune like an old piano, and nobody would come to retune his strings. Dukes and kings may go mad at their leisure, for nobody has enough power to stop them.”

“You see, I had been exploring the tunnels of my own mind, and my greatest idea had come to me.""What was it?" Neverfell was fascinated. "I do not know," the Kleptomancer answered, perfectly phlegmatically. "But I am sure I will let myself know when the time is right. You see, anybody who chases a plan, however secretively and indirectly, gives themselves away. After a while you can predict them, work out what they want. So I decided the only way to avoid this was not to know what the plan was, or even the parts of the plan, until I needed them. Nobody could predict me, because I could not predict myself. Nobody could work out what I wanted, because I did not know what I wanted.”

“Yes, ma’am, I like raspberry cake, only I like it better with no poison or scorpions in it.”

“Every inch of Neverfell seemed to be throbbing with life. Everything was new, and new was a drug.”