“My personal favorite version of the game, Speed Scrabble, is played with tiles only. Each player selects seven tiles. At the call to start, each player turns over his or her tiles. Using these letters, the player creates an individual grid of six letters, with two or possibly three intersecting words, selecting one letter to pass along. The first player to finish calls out the word switch, passes the rejected tiles to the player at the right, and turns over two new tiles from the general pile. Each player then incorporates the new tiles into his or her grid, always rejecting one to pass along at the word switch. Obvious rejects are Q and Z, which usually get passed around. The game is played until the tiles are depleted and one person calls out the word finished. If no one has any questions about the winner's grid, the points on the tiles are added up. Losers deduct the number of points of the unused letters. Each round takes about fifteen or twenty minutes max...”

“Jeff is the annoying kind of Scrabble player who plays a lot of obscure two-letter words that shouldn't count but for whatever reason are considered legitimate. My father is the annoying kind of Scrabble player who takes hours with his turn and then plays deliberately misspelled words that no one has the heart to call him out on. I am the perfect Scrabble player, both serious and considerate. Obviously I lost by a lot.”

“...art is weaker than life - in the end I have a bag of letters to scrabble into order - rune tiles to cast my fate...”

“Colter searched for original Mexican tiles to use as patterns for copies, and during the search, a barrel of old tile letters was found in a cellar corner. She decided to use the letters on the walls of the Cocina Cantina to spell out old Spanish proverbs about eating and drinking. Above the bar was "A vuestra salud" [to your health], and in another room, "Not with whom you were born, but with whom you pasture.”

“The paper was stiff. In red ink were the words HYENAS & TWIN TOWERS, and a game plan that called for the other team's good player to be triple-teamed while the two remaining defenders stayed under the basket, one on each block, to rebound the misses of the other team's bad players.”

“A joyful task,’ he says and she realizes that he welcomes the idea of years of searching, tile by tile, inscription by inscription, cornice by cornice and niche by niche, that the painstaking search of Sinan’s greatest achievement, decades long, is the holy task; that the secret letter is cut in every stone and tile. By the time you find it, you have realized the supreme unimportance of finding it. A Sufi lesson.”