“We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned.”

“Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.”

“Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history”

“If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it.”

“The truth isn't a thing of fact or reason. It is simply what everyone agrees on.”

“The surface of the shoes seemed to pulse with hundreds of reflections and refractions. In the firelight, it was like looking at boiling corpuscles of blood under a magnifying glass.”

“The cunning old cow, thought Melena. She is trying that rarest of strategies, telling the truth, and making it sound plausible.”