“all that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one's childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me.”

“I would eat my soup in silence, but it’s alphabet soup. They’re all capital letters and they are shouting at me. I’m not anorexic or illiterate, so alphabet soup is like a nourishing novel. An anorexic should make a suicide note out of the letters.”

“Someone with an obsession for arranging things in alphabetical order was an abcedist, whereas someone with an obsession for arranging them in reverse alphabetical order was a zyxedist.”

“If I had the gift of flight, would you try to turn me into duck soup?”

“Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.”

“Weren’t all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!”