“A hundred feet underground, in a fake field beneath a fake sky, with an ogre slaughtered like no more than a rat to a cat, and he sends us to search for the unusual.”

“Every libromancer had a first book. Etched more sharply into my memory than my first kiss, this book had been my magical awakening.”

“Smudge continued running laps, flames flickering like tiny orange banners on his back. He was never wrong about danger, but he couldn’t tell you if that danger was a meteorite streaking toward the roof or an amorous moose running amok in the parking lot.”

“Pac-Man?" The beast looked up at me, oversized fangs giving it an expression that straddled the line between deadly and dopey. A string of drool waved pendulum-like from the jaw, pushing it firmly into the latter category. "When he was a puppy, he tried to eat a ghost," Pallas explained.”

“A cop friend downstate had once described what he called the 'pucker effect,' the body's automatic response when something just wasn't right. He wasn't talking about the lips; the puckering happened farther south, and every cop learned to trust that instinct.”

“Given the issues with certain SF/F trophies (like the World Fantasy Award, which is 1) butt-ugly and 2) based on one disgustingly racist dude), all trophies from this point forward should be made out of LEGO. That way if you don't like it, you can just make it into something else.”

“New rule: every fantasy author who doesn't treat horses like tireless hairy motorcycles automatically gets a Hugo.”