In order to have a change of fortune at the last minute, you have to take your fortune to the last minute.

Demons were like genies or philosophy professors - if you didn't word things exactly right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and completely misleading answers.

He'd always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist anymore.

I mean, I wouldn't pay more than a couple of quid to see me, and I'm me.

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

And what had he wanted? He'd never sat down to think about it. But mostly, he wanted yesterday to be different from today.

Young man, the games we play are lessons we learn. The assumptions we make, things we ignore, and things we change make us what we become.