“Why, I believe Sir Ector would have been gladder to get a by-our-lady tilting blue for your tutor, that swings himself along on his knuckles like an anthropoid ape, rather than a magician of known probity and international reputation with first-class honours from every European university.  The trouble with the Norman aristocracy is that they are games-mad, that is what it is, games-mad.”

“Yours...'til the Sphinx winks.”

“The Bible looks like it started out as a game of mad libs.”

“Wizard’s work was a pleasure and a madness. No wonder the university magicians rambled at times like daft bastards.”

“The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.”

“Most of the pack would rather have Darryl mad at them than Auriele.”

“Betrayal was the name of the game—to get what he'd have, to use every weapon in his arsenal”