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“Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said when, on Meggie’s last birthday, they were looking at all her dear old books again. “As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells … and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower … both strange and familiar.”
“Books in beach clothes,” Mo called them, “badly dressed for most occasions but useful when you’re on vacation.”
Perhaps it’s been changed, perhaps this is a new story we’re in and everything in the book is just a pile of dead words, but all the same …”
damn you three times over for all those evenings you spent with the silly child imagining what it would be like to live in that other world, among fairies, brownies, and glass men.
“The others? I don’t know who you’re talking about.” Elinor thought her voice sounded remarkably steady for a woman half dead with terror.
What a child he still was, even though he had proudly shown Dustfinger the first stubble on his chin a few months ago!
I can see you’re still in love with her. How was it you once described her eyes? Little pieces of the sky!”
And they used them to set another world on fire, he added in his thoughts. A world without a door to let me out again, so that I could come back.
You could call war a cripple factory.
“She never wanted anyone to see her cry, either — however good her reasons for tears.”
Now! Farid let the burning straw drop. The hopper swallowed it like a sack of corn and spat it out on Basta’s boots.
“Oh, Sara. It is like a story.” “It is a story … everything is a story. You are a story — I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story.”
“Nonsense!” said Dustfinger, when Farid told him about it. “The Adderhead has a roast quail where other people have a heart. He would never set anyone free out of mercy, however many sons were born to him. No, if he really intends to let them go it’s because Fenoglio wrote it that way, and for no other reason.”
