“There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.”

“No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical point: When millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, but there is no one to hear it, does it - philosophically speaking - make a noise?”

“Million-to-one chances...crop up nine times out of ten.”

“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”

“I mean, it's a good job we've got a last desperate million-to-one chance to rely on, or we'd really be in trouble!”

“...logic is only a way of being ignorant by numbers.”

“Cards and boards, [Johnny] thought. And the dead. That's not dark forces. Making a fuss about cards and heavy metal and going on about Dungeons and Dragons stuff because it's got demon gods in it is like guarding to door when it is really coming up through the floorboards. Real dark forces... aren't dark. They're sort of gray, like Mr. Grimm. They take all the color out of life; they take a town like Blackbury and turn it into frightened streets and plastic signs and Bright New Futures and towers where no one wants to live and no one really does live. The dead seem more alive than us. And everyone becomes gray and turns into numbers and then, somewhere, someone starts to do arithmetic...”