“Cordelia loved his explanations. She loved knowing words that belonged to things she'd never seen, even to things you couldn't see at all. She remembered those words carefully. "Magic," George had said, "is something unnatural, something that doesn't really exist. If I snap my fingers and Othello suddenly turns white, that's magic. If I fetch a bucket of paint and paint him white, it isn't." He laughed, and for a moment it looked as if he felt like snapping his fingers or fetching that bucket. Then he went on, "Everything that looks like magic is really a trick. There's no such thing as magic." Cordelia grazed with relish. "Magic" was her favorite word - for something that didn't exist at all.”

“Cordelia was thinking how human beings can invent words, how they can line up their invented words side by side on paper. It was magic.”

“The sea looked as if it had been licked clean, blue and clear and smooth, and there were a few woolly little clouds in the sky. Legend said that these clouds were sheep who had simply wandered over the cliff tops one day, special sheep who now went on grazing in the sky and were never shorn. In any case, they were a good sign.”

“Justice!” bleated Othello. “Justice!” bleated the other sheep. And so it was decided that George Glenn’s sheep themselves would solve the wicked murder of their shepherd.”

“The group was led by a very thin man whom the sheep didn't know. They looked hard at him. The leader of the flock is always important.”

“No sheep may leave the flock," he said to anyone who would listen, "unless he comes back again.”

“That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it extraordinary and it never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic?”