“Life is not always deep, mostly it's just random. But it’s different in art. In art you can choose to show some things and hide others. And suddenly there's meaning to find in the chaos.”

“Always near, but never there...”

“Orphan could no longer hear or see the shadows of the dead. He didn't think they had perished. Most likely they were hiding now, somewhere in this landscape of books.”

“For one crazy moment he had the notion of a vanished tribe of librarians, lost in the deep underground caverns of the Bodleian, a wild and savage tribe that fed on unwary travellers.”

“Life will go on as long as there is someone to sing, to dance, to tell stories and to listen.”

“They were all machines, he thought, just like La Mettrie had said in L'Homme Machine all those years ago. So he, Orphan, was a machine of flesh and blood, and Lucy, now, was made of something else, more complex perhaps- but they were the same and...They were in love.Sometimes that was enough.”

“The Middle East, that seductive region where [Herman] Melville had hoped to rekindle his inspiration and revive his diminishing career, had proved an egregious disappointment. "The whole thing is half melancholy, half farcical," he groaned, "like all the rest of the world.”