"Too much magic could wrap time and space around itself, and that wasn't good news for the kind of person who had grown used to things like effects following things like causes."

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I was struck by the way in which meanings are historically attached to words: it is so accidental, so remote, so twisted. A word is like a schoolgirl's room--a complete mess--so the great thing is to make out a way of seeing it all as ordered, as right, as inferred and following.

— William H. Gass