“Orphan could no longer hear or see the shadows of the dead. He didn't think they had perished. Most likely they were hiding now, somewhere in this landscape of books.”

“Mosca had preferred it when she could hear the edge in her companion’s voice. Now she felt like someone who knows that there is a scorpion somewhere in the room but can’t see where it is.”

“Catherine's face was just like the landscape—shadows and sunshine flitting over it in rapid succession; but the shadows rested longer, and the sunshine was more transient.”

“He has had to learn to hide it, even more than most of us. Somewhere, I think, there is a center to him. It glows like a coal being slowly crushed into diamond, weighed down by layers and layers of surface.”

“Most people call it The Book of the Dead,” he told me. “Rich Egyptians were always buried with a copy, so they could have directions through the Duat to the Land of the Dead. It’s like an Idiot’s Guide to the Afterlife.”

“Every man becomes the image of the God he adores.He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead.He who loves corruption rots.He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing.”