“Sometimes thought Liir-his first thought in weeks and weeks-sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. It's so much like home, and then it holds out on you.”

“Sometimes it seems to me that things hold together only thanks to the borders, that the true identify of these lands and peoples is the shape of their territories in an atlas. It's a stupid thought, but I can't shake it.”

“It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.”

“I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!”

“You should never have a job that you hate so much you think "Thank God it's Friday" every week of your life.”

“A lot of people were wounded in our kitchen and in the week of a car less than a mile away. And the life I had before- the one I had hated so much- was in the past.”