“It’s a map of a non-existent coast under an imaginary constellation on an impossible sky in—” he grunted, twisting something—“the middle of a ring of meaningless numbers. That’s why it’s powerful. That’s why it’s magic.”

“Magic is always impossible…. It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That is why it's magic.”

“In principio it is impossible to prove from experiments that something is non-existent.”

“What does not exist must be something, or it would be meaningless to deny its existence; and hence we need the concept of being, as that which belongs even to the non-existent.”

“An invention is something that was “impossible” up to then—that’s why governments grant patents.”

“Percy grunted. ‘Probably something to do with that creep Octavian. Maybe he was so bad at telling the future that he broke Apollo’s powers.”

“Number is therefore the most primitive instrument of bringing an unconscious awareness of order into consciousness; from it you can best tap the unconscious constellation. This probably why it is used in most mantic methods.”

“Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.”

“emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.”

“… to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?”