“You are reading while walking, she reads. You can't see your feet. The spread pages glide over the sidewalk, mottled by leaf shadows, by moonlight and streetlight. Over continents of shadow, continents of light. The book is a bird with white wings. You are a bird. Reading, you can fly.You are flying now.”

“What are you grinning at?' Nal muttered. As if in response, the gull spread its wings and opened its shadow over the miniature ruins of the castle - too huge, Nal thought, and vaguely humanoid in shape - and then it flew off, laboring heavily against the wind. In the soft moonlight this created the disturbing illusion that the bird had hitched itself to Nal's shadow and was pulling his darkness from him.”

“You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.”

“There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.”

“That's my point: if you own thirty or more books, or you are reading any book at this moment, you may protest all you want, but you were born on the wrong continent.”

“There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read—unless it be reading while you eat. Amabel did both: they are not the same thing, as you will see if you think the matter over.”

“You will remember when a bird crashed through the window and fell to the floor. You will remember, those of you who were there, how it jerked its wings before dying, and left a spot of blood on the floor after it was removed. But who among you was first to notice the negative bird it left in the window? Who first saw the shadow that the bird left behind, the shadow that drew blood from any finger that dared to trace it, the shadow that was better proof of the bird's existence than the bird ever was?”