“I will tell you the deeper significance of this, which otherwise might seem a banal hydraulic joke. Caus knew that if one fills a vessel with water and seals it at the top, the water, even if one then opens a hole in the bottom, will not come out. But if one opens a hole in the top, also, the water spurts out below." "Isn't that obvious?" I said. "Air enters at the top and presses the water down." "A typical scientific explanation, in which the cause is mistaken for the effect, or vice versa. The question is not why the water comes out in the second place, but why it refuses to come out in the first case." "And why does it refuse?" Garamond asked eagerly. "Because, if it came out, it would leave a vacuum in the vessel, and nature abhors a vacuum. Nequaquam vacui was a Rosicrucian principle, which modern science has forgotten." "Excuse me," Belbo said to Agliè, "but your argument is simply post hoc ergo ante hoc. What follows causes what came before.You must not think linearly. The water in these fountains doesn't. Nature doesn't; nature knows nothing of time. Time is an invention of the West.”

“When one sifts place, ka-lyrra, one comes out on top of whatever currently occupies that space. Which isn't much of a problem if one also has all one's powers. But I don't. We hit a lake somewhere around the ninety-seventh hop. And, contrary to popular belief, I don't walk on water."~Adam to Gabby”

“If their occupation is actual work they prefer to pump water into cisterns,two of which leak through holes in the bottom and one ofwhich is water-tight. A, of course, has the good one;”

“It is rooted deep in your bones; the water calls out to you until it causes you physical pain unless you come to it.”

“I have a deep-down belief that there are folks in the world who are good through and through, and others who came in mean and will go out mean. It's like coffee. Once it's roasted, it all looks brown. Until you pour hot water on it and see what comes out. Folks get into hot water, you see what comes out.”

“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.”