“Penelope did not understand how this [study] group was ever formed. It consisted only of her mortal enemies. However, these were things you seemed to put aside during exam period.”

“In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled.”

“All the mortal world is a lethal enemy during those hours between dawn and dusk.”

“She had put despair and fear aside, as if they were garments she did not choose to wear.”

“What if it were true that nature speaks in signs and that the secret to understanding its language consists in noticing similarities in shape or in form?”

“He couldn’t understand how I could be so bright in my other classes and a total failure in his. I must not be trying hard enough, he told me. In truth, I didn’t care, and I didn’t want to care. Geometric shapes with their dangerously sharp angles seemed the mortal enemies of words, and formulas were written in a hostage-taking language that made me despair of ever freeing the words from their captors. The best I could do was to avoid the enemy and save myself.”