When he said to give him the sword, I don’t think he meant for you to stick it in his guts.

There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like this: Someone shrugs off the weight of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his countrymen think to be completely batshit insane. Of those, Galileo was my personal favorite. Van Gogh comes in second, but he really was batshit insane.

Before he (Francis Bacon) came along, people conducted all their arguments through a series of logical fallacies or simply shouting louder than the other guy, or, if they did use facts, they only selected ones that reinforced their prejudices and advanced their ideas.” Oberon replies “don’t they still do that?

But now that she was my apprentice, every such thought caused a guilty twitch in my neck, as if someone had dropped a sleek, stinky ferret there. Guilt ferrets are bastards.

As any war veteran will tell you, there is a vast difference between preparing for battle and actually facing battle for the first time. You can be told that reading Victor Hugo will sap your will to live, but you can't understand what it means until you've read a few chapters and your eyes are glazed over and someone has to revive you with a defibrillator.

The point is, Mrs. MacDonagh, that the universe is exactly the size that your soul can encompass. Some people live in extremely small worlds, and some live in a world of infinite possibility.

I yawned and stretched luxuriously in the morning. I make noises when I stretch because it feels ten times better than stretching silently.