“Master Stuart made his letters into paper darts and launched them page by page from the roof of the house-watching them descend and fade into the green ravine below...Some he saved to trade at school for other artifacts of war sent home by other elder brothers like his own-but only the letters mailed from France were worthy of this exchange. They had to have the smell of fire.”

“There will be pages. Lots and lots of pages. Most of the pages will have letters on them, and a vast majority of these letters will be in the Roman alphabet.”

“But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.”

“Little notes, scrawled on half-sheets of paper, and letters, when he was away, page after page, intimate, their news. Her voice, echoing through the house, and down the garden, careless and familiar like the writing in the book.And I had to call him Maxim.”

“What will happen to those who stone the prophets and persecute the masters? His fate is written in flaming letters on each page of the history.”

“His eyes glistened. I'd never seen eyes that bright or that green. His were emblazoned by a dark symphony. When he blinked, his lashes spread below his bottom lid like satin spider legs, a million wishes to be made upon them, in exchange for these nightmares.”