At my birth, an aunt — I will spare you her name because my tale is full of aunts — washed and wrapped me...

pharmaka — It was the word Aeetes had used, when he spoke of herbs with wonderous powers, sprung from the fallen blood of gods.

However often I had used an herb before, each cutting had its own character. One rose would give up its secrets if it were ground, another must be pressed, a third steeped. Each spell was a mountain to be climbed anew. All I could carry with me from last time was the knowledge that it could be done.

Brave, dull-brained Ajax, built like a mountainside.

"Give him to me, I said. I held him up before me and looked into his screaming face. 'Sweet son,' I said, 'you are right, this world is a wild and terrible place, and worth shouting at. But you are safe now, and all of us need to sleep. Will you let us have a little peace?' And he calmed."

"I saw Achilles and Patroclus and Ajax bearing the wound he gave himself. They envied me my life, but at least their battles are done."

This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition.

Of course: there are themes that recur, the text is interwoven with these reprises, which serve to express the fluctuation of time. You are the sort of reader who is sensitive to such refinements; you are quick to catch the author's intentions and nothing escapes you.

What you would like is the opening of an abstract and absolute space and time in which you could move, following an exact, taut trajectory; but when you seem to be succeeding, you realize you are motionless, blocked, forced to repeat everything from the beginning.

They want problems to debate, general ideas to connect with other general ideas.

...seashells as a deceptive harmony, a container concealing the true substance of nature...

"Books are the steps of the threshold...All Cimmerian authors have passed it...Then the wordless language of the dead begins, which says the things that only the language of the dead can say."

The chronology is also uncertain: there are letters that refer to previous communications, which, however, prove to have been written later; there are letters that promise further explanations, which instead are found in pages dated a week earlier.

...to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.

...between the book and her there would always be insinuated the shadow of mystification, and he, identifying himself with every mystification, would have affirmed his presence.

The mirror walls reflect on my image an infinite number of times. Had I been kidnapped by myself? Had one of my images cast into the world taken my place and relegated me to the role of reflected image? Had I summoned the Prince of Darkness and was he appearing to me in my own likeness?

If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits...The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes."

The romantic fascination produced in the pure state by the first sentences of the first chapter of many novels is soon lost in the continuation of the story: it is the promise of a time of reading that extends before us and can comprise all possible developments.

The book of my memory? No, memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form.

"...As long as I know there exists in the world something who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues..."

I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

"Can't have an owl running around in a knight's body." Collum agreed that one absolutely could not have owls running around in knights' bodies.

Bedivere loved God, but he loved Arthur more, and he felt nostalgic for the days when the great game of knighthood was just a game. He would have given his life to protect Arthur, but he couldn't protect him from God.

Once the divine machinery of an adventure was in motion Arthur liked to draw it out, study it, and savor its every last wrinkle.

Too much had happened, he needed the sorting angel of dreams to come down and sift it all into piles for him, make it into stories and tell him what it all meant and which bits he could safely forget.

A laundress had to be a bit of an alchemist too.

The preparations wound up taking some hours and included the messy slaughter of two lams outside the tent as well as much lighting of candles and drawing of chalk glyphs and singing in languages Collum didn't recognize.