Tangled Mind

After six months in New Amsterdam, Trinidad, Humboldt had examined everything that lacked the feet and the fear to run away from him. He had measured the colour of the sky, the temperature of lightning flashes, and the weight of the hoarfrost at night ... [he] dug holes, dropped thermometers on long threads down wells, and put peas on drumheads. The quake would certainly begin again, he said cheerfully. Soon the whole town would be in ruins. (p. 56)

...aether is like no other element, and it shuns all physical rules. It is weightless, and notoriously difficult to contain. Purified, its wyreglow fills the darkness, but spills shadows in bright light. Strangest of all, and yet most crucial to all the industries and livelihoods it helps sustain, aether responds to the will of the human spirit ... with it, we are able to make things more thinly, more cheaply, more quickly and — it has to be admitted — often more crudely than the harsh and inconvenient rules of simple nature would ever allow. Boilers which would otherwise explode, pistons which would stutter, buildings and beams and bearings which would shatter and crumble, are borne aloft from mere physics on the aether-fuelled bubbles of guildsmen's spells. (p.30)

Real life is physical. Give me books instead: give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book: I'd give anything for that. Being cursed by The End of Mr Y must mean becoming part of the book; an intertextual being: a book-cyborg, or considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg. Things in books can't get dirty, and real life is, well, eventually it's dust. Even books become dust ... but thoughts are clean. (p.147)

"You're telling me you think Chib Calloway is a man to be trusted?"
"He's got more to lose than any of us. With a record like his, the law would come down on him like Carl Andre's bricks." (p. 103)

The air is richer and the greens are greener and at night there are so many stars in the sky that it's terrifying. The Mesozoic swarms with life. You can't appreciate how thinned-out and impoverished our time is until you go back. Rain forests are nothing ... With my own eyes, I have seen a plesiosaur give birth. This hand stroked her living neck as she lay quivering in the shallows afterward. (p. 41)

As the boy crashed past Flute and Hayley the foremost dog almost caught him and then lost ground because it had a bloodstained piece of the boy's trousers in its mouth. The rest chased on furiously.
Hayley clutched Flute's hand. "Do they catch him?"
Flute nodded. "I'm afraid so."
Hayley was horrified. "Why?"
"He managed to be really offensive to a goddess," Flute told her. "Things like this happen on every strand, you know. The mythosphere is not an entirely happy place."
"But it looks so beautiful!" Hayley protested.
Flute laughed a little. "Beauty isn't made of sugar." (p.56)

Phryne inspected her bed-hangings, which were black silk embroidered with green leaves, and her mossy sheets, which were dark to show off her white body. Her carpet was green and soft as new grass, and her mirrors appropriately pink, and framed in ceramic vine leaves. All she needed now was a bacchanalian lover to match the room. (p. 23)