"Family wasn't like that, not really. It was not something small and compact, a "nuclear family": it was a great big mess of people, all interlinked, cousins and aunts and relatives-by-marriage and oth..."
- Lavie Tidhar
"Destiny is like a book. It needs manufacturing, the pulp process, the glue fixed tightly--and it requires a binding, to hold it together, lest it fall apart."
"Think of the future, she whispers. Jumbled images in primary colours. White and red swastika flags waving in the wind; gleaming rockets flying into the air; skyscrapers rise above the Danube, the Tham..."
"In the words he’s free, on the page he can be anything. A hero."
"The fat man looked amused. "What on earth for?" he said. "I never have any contact with writers. If I do, they just keep pestering me about getting paid."
"Listen to this. A bomb goes off downtown and the police arrest the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and Osama Bin Laden. They put them in an identity parade and have a witness try to point o..."
"I was covered in gore, dripping in slime, and in a very bad mood."
"Somewhere in the distance he could hear a wireless playing Judy Garland's 'Over the Rainbow.' Wolf had seen the film but, had he been the one swept up to the magical land of Oz, he would have raised a..."
"Orphan could no longer hear or see the shadows of the dead. He didn't think they had perished. Most likely they were hiding now, somewhere in this landscape of books."
"For one crazy moment he had the notion of a vanished tribe of librarians, lost in the deep underground caverns of the Bodleian, a wild and savage tribe that fed on unwary travellers."