I sat enchanted, far from my gods, adrift in the boat of spices, in the sigh of the South, in the net of the wheeling stars, in the country of dolphins.

People talked about loneliness as if it were something alive and it could get you. But loneliness is something dead, it’s deadness. Lonely people are slowly dying people.

I should die,” said Ivrom. “That is blasphemy,” the old man answered kindly. “I should suffer.” “You are suffering, are you not?” “Not enough.” “Consider the sufferings ordained by the Nameless Gods,” the priest quoted. “A cupful weighs as much as an ocean.” In fact – as Ivrom would discover later – a cupful weighs much more. When.

There is enough cruelty in the world,” she told me softly, “to justify all the music ever made.

The word for “book” in all the known languages of the earth is vallon, “chamber of words,” the Olondrian name for that tool of enchantment and art.

The tunneling entrance curves before it opens into this space and there is absolute, waiting, coiled, and sentient blackness.

I want to stay there. I don’t want to go any further. I want to stay. I can’t remember who it was – one of the poets, perhaps Tamundein – who said that all of our happiest hours must pass away at last, even those in which we believe we are unhappy.

Ravhathos called the life of the poet “the fair and fatal road, of which even the dust and stones are dear to my heart,” and cautioned that those who spend long hours engaged in reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward.

The silence had a depth to it, like the stillness after a bell has been struck and the echoes have died away, and one waits for what has been summoned.

A book,” says Vandos of Ur-Amakir, “is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.