People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh."

[Afterword]

I do think his books would reward reading by people who think they don't like fantasy.

It struck him that the true characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.

...it seemed a part of her life, to step from the ancient to the modern, back and forth. She felt rather sorry for those who knew only one and not the other. It was better, she thought, to be able to select from the whole menu of human achievements than to be bound within one narrow range.

We live in a society where pizza takes shorter time to reach your house compared to the police, fire brigade, or ambulance.

Is this the curse of modernity, to live in a world without judgment, without perspective, no context for understanding or distinguishing what is real and what is imagined, what is manipulated and what is by chance beautiful, what is shadow and what is flesh?