“Around them small animals scampered along knotted cables and flaking vines, chirruping, squealing, venting yellow farts. Everywhere was animation, purpose, hurry. Momentum.”

“Definitions, her grandmother once said, had to be like a fat man's belt - big enough to cover the subject but elastic enough to allow for change.The Sunborn”

“It is one thing to speak of embracing the new, the fresh, the strange. It is another to feel that one is an insect, crawling across a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, knowing only that something vast is passing by beneath, all without your sensing more than a yawning vacancy.”

“Elphaba looked like something between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life.”

“Liir didn’t know what to say to that; he wasn’t sure what husbandry was.“Animal husbandry,” Trism explained, though in the noise of the bar, Liir couldn’t tell if he said Animal or animal, the sentient or the nonsentient creature.“Training for military uses,” said Trism at last. “Are you slow, or are you falling in love with me?"”

“Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.”

“The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.”