“You're a poem?' I repeated.She chewed her lower lip. 'If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whose world was swallowed by the sea.''Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?''What's your name?''Enn.''So you are Enn,' she said. 'And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?”

“I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose world was swallowed by the sea.”

“Look. I brought you here to give you a choice-""You didn't bring us here," said Nick."You're here," said Bod. "I wanted you here. I came here. You followed me. Same thing.”

“How old are you?" said the girl. "What are you doing here? Do you live here? What's your name?" "I don't know," said Bod. "You don't know your name?" said the girl. "Course you do. Everybody knows their own name. Fibber." "I know my name," said Bod. "And I know what I'm doing here. But I don't know the other things you said.”

“You get work however you get work, but people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of todays world is freelance), because their work is good, because they are easy to get along with and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three! Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it is good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.”

“Fat Charlie blew his nose. "I never knew I had a brother," he said."I did," said Spider. "I always meant to look you up, but I got distracted. You know how it is.""Not really.""Things came up.""What kind of things?""Things. They came up. That's what things do. They come up. I can't be expected to keep track of them all.""Well, give me a f'rinstance."Spider drank more wine. "Okay. The last time I decided that you and I should meet, I, well, I spent days planning it. Wanted it to go perfectly. I had to choose my wardrobe. Then I had to decide what I'd say to you when we met. I knew that the meeting of two brothers, well, it's the subject of epics, isn't it? I decided that the only way to treat it with the appropriate gravity would be to do it in verse. But what kind of verse? Am I going to rap it? Declaim it? I mean, I'm not going to greet you with a limerick. So. It had to be something dark, something powerful, rhythmic, epic. And then I had it. The perfect line: Blood calls to blood like sirens in the night. It says so much. I knew I'd be able to get everything in there - people dying in alleys, sweat and nightmares, the power of free spirits uncrushable. Everything was going to be there. And then I had to come up with a second line, and the whole thing completely fell apart. The best I could come up with was Tum-tumpty-tumpty-tumpty got a fright."Fat Charlie blinked. "Who exactly is Tum-tumpty-tumpty-tumpty?""It's not anybody. It's just there to show you where the words ought to be. But I never really got any futher on it than that, and I couldn't turn up with just a first line, some tumpties and three words of an epic poem, could I? That would have been disrespecting you.""Well....""Exactly. So I went to Hawaii for the week instead. Like I said, something came up.”

“We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again.”