“If Attolia could look like a queen, Eugenides was like a god revealed, transformed into something wholly unfamiliar, surrounded by the cloth-of-gold bedcover like a deity on an altar, passionless and calculating.”

“Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.”

“Jalil: I think you look like a queen.”

“They wanted them to look like the Gods.
God doesn't look like this.”

“Mortals deem that the gods are begotten as they are,
and have clothes like theirs, and voice and form.”

“One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar and I didn't know it. I mean there was a little blood there, and something like that.”

“An Assassin, a real Assassin, had to look like one - black clothes, hood, boots, and all. If they could wear any clothes, any disguise, then what could anyone do but spend all day in a small room with a loaded crossbow pointed at the door?”

“On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.”

“No honour was left for the gods, when Augustus chose to be himself worshipped with temples and statues, like those of the deities, and with flamens and priests.”
Nihil deorum honoribus relictum, cum se templis et effigie numinum per flamines et sacerdotes coli vellet.

“I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.”