“He frowned as he struggled to remember. It was like watching an elephant crochet.”

“Hercules, huh? Percy frowned. "That guy was like the Starbucks of Ancient Greece. Everywhere you turn--there he is.”

“Ella is nervous,” the harpy muttered from her perch on the railing. “The elephant. The elephant is watching Ella.”

“The literature of former days is like watching a fire from across the water; in present-day literature, the author himself is being scorched by the fire and he is bound to feel it deeply, and when he begins to feel it deeply, he is bound to take part in the social struggle.”

“It's like God's. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.”

“Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.”

“Most of the original group [of elephants] succumbed to the climate, and he [Hannibal] was always begging Carthage for more, but the people at home were stingy. They would ask if he thought they were made of elephants and what he had done with the elephants they sent before. Sometimes, when he hadn't an elephant to his name, he would manage to wangle a few from somewhere, a feat which strikes me as his greatest claim to our attention.”

“But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant”

“No one likes to be watched constantly by someone he can’t see.”

“Remember, he was a fanatic, and there is no fanatic like a religious fanatic.”