"You have many fine qualities that I admire. But you are out of time. You should have been born a century ago, when values such as yours meant something."

"There are two schools of thought about the resilience of time. The first is that time is highly volatile, with every small event altering the possible outcome of the earth's future. The other view is that time is rigid, and no matter how hard you try, it will always spring back toward a determined present. Myself, I do not worry about such trivialities. I simply sell ties to anyone who wants to buy one..."

"Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head."

"I didn't set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind."

"Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought--and more reading."

"Magic is the fifth fundamental force and is even more mysterious than gravity, which is really saying something."

"No one would argue that we owe a debt of gratitude to the Goliath Corporation. They helped us to rebuild after the Second War and it should not be forgotten. Of late, however, it seems as though the Goliath Corporation is falling far short of its promises of fairness and altruism. We are finding ourselves now in the unfortunate position of continuing to pay back a debt that has long since been paid--with interest..."

"History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times."

"Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world, I said, "but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be-it isn't a mirror, it's an aspiration."

"Religion isn't the cause of wars, it's the excuse."

"The best plans are always the simplest."

"Keep your head down, Edward. Those that see too much quickly find themselves seeing nothing at all."

"Those that see too much quickly find themselves seeing nothing at all."

"Outside Styx's apartment was not the first time Rochester and I had met, or would it be the last. We first encountered each other at Haworth House in Yorkshire when my mind was young and the barrier between reality and make-believe had not yet hardened into the shell that cocoons us in adult life. The barrier was soft, pliable and, for a moment, thanks to the kindness of a stranger and the power of a good storytelling voice, I made the short journey--and returned."

"Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time."

"I was born on a Thursday, hence the name. My brother was born on a Monday and they called him Anton--go figure. My mother was called Wednesday, but was born on a Sunday--I don't know why--and my father had no name at all--his identity and existence had been scrubbed by the ChronoGuard after he went rogue. To all intents and purposes he didn't exist at all. It didn't matter. He was always Dad to me..."

"Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them."

"So you're going to have to ask yourselves on simple question: Which one of us is speaking now?"

"The front room of his house was what I called 'untidy chic'. Prefects weren't subject to the same Rules on room tidiness, but since no one really enjoyed clutter, a certain style of ordered untidiness was generally considered de couleur for a prefect's room."

"Before, I suspected I might not amount to anything, and now I now I won't, so at least it takes away the wearisome burden of delusive hope."

"Chromatacia society ruled by a colortocracy social hierarchy based upon one's limited color perception, society is dominated by color. In this world, you are what you can see."

"7. 3. 12. 31. 208: Reckless disrespect of the lightless hours will not be tolerated."

"You're talking about gold and silver, cash and securities. I'm talking about the sheer beauty of the land, the value of unpolluted parkland made wild and staying wild forever."

"If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution."

"Love and magic are like oil and water--they just don't mix."

"Rouge of my heart, intertwined with double-hued destiny,Thread of my thoughts, constant and rubicund legacy,Filament of my future, endeared unto my expectation,Cord of my emotion, seared with eternal elation."

"That's the thing about destiny: It can't be predicted, and it's usually pretty odd."

"The only way to write is to write. Writers write. And when they've written, they write some more."

"Well, that's it." I said after we had waited for another five minutes and found ourselves still in a state of pleasantly welcome existence. "The ChronoGuard has shut itself down and time travel is as it should be: technically, logically, and theoretically...impossible." "Good thing, too," reply Landon. "It always made my head ache. In fact, I was thinking of doing self help book for science-fiction novelists eager to write about time travel. It would consist of a single word: Don't."

"Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corrpution and error hardwired at inception."

"After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more."

"They had just digested a recent meal of prepositions and were happily farting out apostrophes and ampersands, the air was heav'y with th'em&."

"Prejudice is a product of ignorance that hides behind barriers of tradition."

"I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years," she announced with some small sense of achievement. "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade."

"Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books."

"Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one."

"Curiosity is a descending stair that leads to only who-knows-where."

"I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!"

"The cucumber and the tomato are both fruit; the avocado is a nut. To assist with the dietary requirements of vegetarians, on the first Tuesday of the month a chicken is officially a vegetable."

"Death doesn't care about personalities - he's more interested in meeting quotas."

"People don't change just because you know more about them."

"Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere."

"Pretend to be mad and talk a lot. Then - and this is the important bit - do nothing at all until you absolutely have to and then make sure everyone dies."

"My only companion from the outside world during nineteen years of isolation has been my personal hatred of Thursday Next. It's kind of like the old me suddenly taking over, and I promised myself that this was how I would act if I ever saw you.' 'I have the same thing, but with Tom Stoppard,' I said. 'You'd kill Tom Stoppard?' 'Not at all. I promised myself many years ago that I would throw myself at his feet and scream "I'm not worthy!" if I ever met him, so now if we're ever at the same party or something, I have to be at pains to avoid him. It would be undignified, you see-for him and for me."

"The course of true love rarely runs smooth."

"I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you."

"Though his death would not fill me with any sense of sadness, I would probably feel the loss. Even enemies are part of one."

"Magic swirls about us like an invisible fog of energy that can be tapped by those gifted enough, using a variety of techniques that center on layered spelling, mumbled incantations, and a burst of concentrated thought channeled through the index fingers. The technical name for this energy is "variable electro-gravitational mutable subatomic force," which doesn't mean anything at all--confused scientists just gave it an important-sounding name so as not to lose face. The usual term is "wizidrical energy," or simply "the crackle."

"Said by Colin the dragon:"It's somewhat bizarre to learn that many of you (humans)think that other humans are somehow different enough to be hated and killed, when in reality you're all all tiresomely similiar in outlook, needs and motivation, and differ only by peculiar habits, generally shaped by geographical circumstance."

"Yes, and imagine a world where there were no hypothetical situations."