“To all my librarian friends, champions of books, true magicians in the House of Life. Without you, this writer would be lost in the Dust.”

“There will be guards,” Bast said. “And traps. And alarms. You can bet the house is heavily charmed to keep out gods.”“Magicians can do that?” I asked. I imagined a big can of pesticide labeled God-Away.”

“As a magician, you must think about chaos and order. Those are the two forces that control the universe.”

“All I could think of was that the teachers must've found the illegal stash of candy I'd been selling out of my dorms room. Or maybe they'd realized I got my Essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book.”

“What’s the point of being a magician if you can’t wave your wand and make the people you care about feel better?”

“Once I saw Desjardins’ house, I hated him even more. It was a huge mansion on the other side of the Tuileries, on the rue des Pyramids.“Pyramids Road?” Sadie said. “Obvious, much?”“Maybe he couldn’t find a place on Stupid Evil Magician Street,” I suggested.”

“For the rest of my life I would be thinking about her. She would always be my biggest WHAT IF.”