As I followed Margo's directions through the maze of one-way streets, we saw a few people sleeping on the sidewalk or sitting on benches, but nobody was moving. Margo rolled down the window, and I felt the thick air blow across my face, warmer than night ought to be. I glanced over and saw strands of her hair blowing all around her face. Even though I could see her there, I felt entirely alone among these big and empty buildings, like I'd survived the apocalypse and the world had been given to me, this whole and amazing and endless world, mine for the exploring.

All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.

Books belong to their readers.

It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you.

You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town.

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel ... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.

I didn't want to look at them, so I looked away, and to look away was to look at Augustus.