“If there were a Jessica Chase instruction manual, it would be written backwards in Arabic Pig Latin and twelve thousand pages long with random pages missing.”

“He sighed and wiped a hand over his face. If there were a Jessica Chace instruction manual, it would be written backwards in Arabic Pig Latin and twelve thousand pages long with random pages missing.”

“Why are there such long words in the world, Miss?’ enquires Sophie, when the mineralogy lesson is over.‘One long difficult word is the same as a whole sentence full of short easy ones, Sophie,’ says Sugar. ‘It saves time and paper.’ Seeing that the child is unconvinced, she adds, ‘If books were written in such a way that every person, no matter how young, could understand everything in them, they would be enormously long books. Would you wish to read a book that was a thousand pages long, Sophie?’Sophie answers without hesitation.‘I would read a thousand million pages, Miss, if all the words were words I could understand.”

“The Affordable Health Care for Americans Act, passed by the House of Representatives on November 7, 2009, was 1,990 pages long. You could stand on it to paint the ceiling. The entire U.S. Constitution can be printed on eight pages. That's eight pages to run a whole country for 221 years versus four reams of government pig latin if you slam your thumb in a car door.”

“I don’t suppose there’s a Georgina Kincaid Instruction Manual around somewhere to help me avoid these embarrassing blunders in the future.”“We sell them downstairs.”“Oh yeah? Is there a page on how to woo the fair Georgina?”“Page? Hell, there’s a whole chapter.”“Required reading, I’d imagine.”“Definitely.”

“But it was too early to know: there were always more pages to go, more words to be written, before the story was over.”