“But that was Isabelle — if there was a boy around and blame that needed to be pinned on someone, Isabelle would pin it on him”

“Isabelle and Sebastian? Hardly. Sebastian’s a nice guy – Isabelle only likes dating thoroughly inappropriate boys our parents will hate. Mundanes, Downworlders, petty crooks…”
“Thanks,” Simon said. “I’m glad to be classed with the criminal element.”

“Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?”

“Simon bristled. She wasn’t his Isabelle, not anymore. He wondered if she ever truly had been. Isabelle didn’t seem like the type of girl to belong to someone. It was one of the things he liked best about her.”

“The important thing in my view is not to pin the blame for a mistake on somebody, but rather to find out what caused the mistake.”

“Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians…”

“If wits were pins, the man would be a veritable hedgehog.”

“See a pin and pick it up, and, all day long, you'll have a pin.”

“Hello?" Isabelle called from the other side. "Simon, is your diva moment over? I need to talk to Jace.”

“Miller was staring at him like an entomologist trying to figure out exactly where the pin went.”