“The creatures came up the stairs a few at a time, pausing to sit up and sniff the air. Their eyes glinted in the darkness.They were a foot long. They were covered in moth-eaten grey fur and they had enormous fangs and big bushy tails, and there were maybe twenty of them, chittering from all around.Vampire crack squirrels, thought James, and wished he hadn't.”

“If at one time or another I have brushed a few colleagues the wrong way, I must apologize: I had not realized that they were covered with fur.”

“Take it for all in all, a representative gathering of Twing life and thought. The Nibs were whispering in a pleased manner to each other, the Lower Middles were sitting up very straight, as if they'd been bleached, and the Tough Eggs whiled away the time by cracking nuts and exchanging low rustic wheezes.”

“Twenty-three stories up and all I could see out the windows was grey smog. They could call it the City of the Angels if they wanted to, but if there were angels out there, they had to be flying blind.”

“In the beginning the stories were long and colored, but as he grew old and his eyes clouded, the stories were told in only a few words, and she came to understand that all the colors had fallen away from him, leaving only the moments. A woman who performed tricks in the air, an animal pulling a boat under water, dead children who spoke in bones. A man who loved bottles.”

“Such bees! Bilbo had never seen anything like them."If one were to sting me," He thought "I should swell up as big as I am!”