“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

“Blackjack," Percy said, "this is Piper and Jason. They're friends."The horse nickered."Uh, maybe later," Percy answered.Piper had heard that Percy could speak to horses, being the son of the horse lord Poseidon, but she'd never seen it in action."What does Blackjack want?" she asked."Donuts," Percy said. "Always donuts.”

“How many people are we going to lose before the universe decides we've had enough?" Carly asked me. I didn't answer, but if I had known what was coming I would have said, "All of them.”

“You’re going to have to learn to ride a horse on your own, Phaedra', he said. 'It will make the journey faster.''The mule and I have an agreement.''The mule and you have similar traits.”

“Later, Wendy would tell people on the ship that they had battled pirates. But she would never say that Tiger Lily had betrayed them, or that she had rescued them either. Because that would have meant asking a question she couldn't comprehend asking: why the native girl might have wanted her dead. It didn't fit her ideas of who was bad, and who was good, and what was a happy ending, and what wasn't.”

“A world full of people who want to know what you will be, what is your skill and what is your purpose. In the north, if a man had come and said "What will you be? What will you do?" I would have laughed at this kind of person that lives all the time in the future.”