“The shapes arranged themselves into words, and the words spelled out a delicious and wonderful phrase: Once upon a time.”

“Numbers arrange themselves the way numbers will, just as a word will, a story.”

“Magic is a kind of energy. It is given shape by human thoughts and emotions, by imagination. Thoughts define that shape—and words help to define those thoughts. That’s why wizards usually use words to help them with their spells. Words provide a sort of insulation as the energy of magic burns through a spell caster’s mind.”

“Once upon a time," he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.”

“...words so precisely placed that in combination with other words, also precisely placed, they carve out a shape in space and time.”

“If the words of this book are misspelled, but accidentally spell other words correctly, and also accidentally fall into a grammatically coherent arrangement, where coherency is defined as whatever doesn't upset people, it means this book is legally another book, and not this book.”