Feelings and intuition, love and compassion, those are the things make a soul, not blood and bones or machine parts.

If you didn’t divide it up, carve things into categories, it was all one in the same anyway – waves and oceans, dawns and sunsets, noise and silence. Life was a single connected river that ran through mechanicals, people, animals, planets. Everything that ever was or would be, all mixed together in a soup of being; of shouting and jumping, moving and bumping. Echoes of the great creation.

There’s no point living in fear of what might be when it prevents you enjoying the freedom of what is.

Malkin pressed his forepaws against the flight-deck window and peered out. The silver airship was still following; gaining on them. The purr of its propellers and the whoosh of its knife-sharp hull cutting through the air sent a shiver of terror through his clockwork innards.

Jack stepped through the crack into the night. Outside the yard was quiet and thick dark clouds hid the moon from view.

In her short life Lily Hartman had come back from the dead not once, but twice. Neither time had been particularly pleasant. The first she didn’t liketo recall; the second she wished every day she could forget.

The trouble was, Lily reflected, as she sneaked up the last set of stairs to the girls' dormitory, she didn't want the life of a well-bred Victorian young lady, she wanted the life of an air-pirate.

If Spring-Heeled Jack, or Varney the Vampyre, or the air-pirates, or any of the other blackguards who roamed England, ever caught any of those girls in a dark alley they'd be dead for sure.

The Kraken was somewhat obsessed with posture. As for Lily, she barely gave it a second thought. In her opinion it was better to read books than balance them. That’s what they were designed for, after all. And if you wanted to wear something on your head there was a perfectly good item designed for that too: it was called a hat.

The soul’s a matter of the heart, Robert, and the heart’s a mystery even the greatest scientists don’t understand.