Arm of the Sphinx (The Books of Babel, #2)

by Josiah Bancroft

As often as not, as soon as a captain became the subject of a song or a limerick, he was welcomed to immortality with a mortal wound.

“He was a bad captain.” “But a worse bird,” Voleta said.

“As headmaster, it was my job to teach children how to think like adults. It was their job, apparently, to teach me to think like a child, to expect the disruption, to anticipate the thumbtack on the chair or the lizard in the drawer.”

by some fabulous miracle I find my wife, I still hold out hope that she will not receive me as a stranger.”

“Just because you don’t recognize mercy doesn’t mean you haven’t been shown it.”

It is a fact which students suspect but which teachers are loath to admit: being the tallest in the room contributes more to one’s authority than all the years at college.

If there isn’t peril, then it isn’t an adventure.”

“Do you recognize me?” Edith asked, trying to discern the meaning of all this. The blond officer surveyed her face briefly. “No. Perhaps you’re part of the later story.”

The gaps in a library are like footprints in the sand; they show us where others have gone before; they assure us we are not alone.

Books are seldom more than an author elaborating upon their obsession with the grammar of self-doubt.

‘Home.’ What a funny word to use for all that lies behind me.

I must forgive myself. I must beg the pardons that I owe. And I must decide to make my life more than a tribute to past failures.

“The essential lesson of the zoetrope is this: movement, indeed all progress, even the passage of time, is an illusion. Life is the repetition of stillness.”

He wondered if he wasn’t overlooking what he was looking for.