“That's the thing about destiny: It can't be predicted, and it's usually pretty odd.”

“…Tell me, has anything odd happened to you recently?What do you mean, odd?'Unusual. Deviating from the customary. Something outside the usual parameters of normalcy. An occurrence of unprecedented weird.”

“For a taste that's a bit more distinct, eat a bird before it's extinct.”

“How fishy on the fishiness scale? Ten is a stickleback and one is a whale shark.""A whale isn't a fish, Thursday.""A whale shark is--sort of.""All right, it's as fishy as a crayfish.""A crayfish isn't a fish.""A starfish, then.""Still not a fish.""This is a very odd conversation, Thursday.”

“Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.”

“This is our siblings of more famous BookWorld Personalities self-help group expalined Loser (Gatsby). That's Sharon Eyre, the younger and wholly disreputable sister of Jane; Roger Yossarian, the draft dodger and coward; Rupert Bond, still a virgin and can't keep a secret; Tracy Capulet, who has slept her way round Verona twice; and Nancy Potter, who is a Muggle.”

“That's the big difference between [the BookWorld] and [the RealWorld]," said Plum. "When things happen after a randomly pointless event, all that follows is simply unintended consequences, not a coherent narrative thrust that propels the story forward."I rolled the idea of unintended consequences around in my head. "Nope, I said finally, "you've got me on that one.""It confuses me, too," admitted Plum, "but that's the RealWorld for you. A brutal and beautiful place, run for the most part on passion, fads, incentives, and mathematics. A lot of mathematics.”