Home > Work > Libriomancer (Magic Ex Libris, #1)
1 " Every libromancer had a first book. Etched more sharply into my memory than my first kiss, this book had been my magical awakening. "
― Jim C. Hines , Libriomancer (Magic Ex Libris, #1)
2 " Some people would say it's a bad idea to bring a fire-spider into a public library. Those people would probably be right, but it was better than leaving him alone in the house for nine hours straight. The one time I tried, Smudge had expressed his displeasure by burning through the screen that covered his tank, burrowing into my laundry basket, and setting two weeks' worth of clothes ablaze. "
3 " ...bookstores, libraries... they're the closest thing I have to a church. "
4 " Like any child raised on tales of magical worlds beyond paintings and mirrors and wardrobes, I had yearned to enter Middle Earth, to reach through. "
5 " This presents a serious question." They both looked at me. "What's that?" asked Lena. "Whether to start you off with a Doctor Who marathon or dive straight into Firefly. "
6 " Any factual errors that remain are entirely the fault of Bob, who snuck into the offices at DAW to try to sabotage my book. I hate that guy. "
7 " I was amused to note that even vampires obeyed the unwritten rules of elevator etiquette. "
8 " Isaac: “Besides, is it really stealing if you’re stealing from an asshole?”Lena: “I’d have to double-check, but I don’t think the criminal code includes an asshole clause. "
9 " Which reminds me, there's a vampire hand in your freezer's ice maker." Seeing my aghast expression, she added, "Don't worry. I double-bagged it. "
10 " Two libriomancers had been disciplined for trying to get an early copy of the last Harry Potter book. "
11 " Of course, once you had yanked Conan the Barbarian's sword out of a book to fight off a rabid weresquirrel, "impossible" lost a lot of its punch. "
12 " I closed my eyes, feeling the tug of the books. This was my refuge, my fortress of solitude. Standing in this quiet cave, surrounded by walls of books, was normally enough to ease my mind no matter how stressful things got . . . but not today. Today the books called to me. Every one was a gateway to magic, waiting to be unlocked. "
13 " A cop friend downstate had once described what he called the 'pucker effect,' the body's automatic response when something just wasn't right. He wasn't talking about the lips; the puckering happened farther south, and every cop learned to trust that instinct. "
14 " Smudge continued running laps, flames flickering like tiny orange banners on his back. He was never wrong about danger, but he couldn’t tell you if that danger was a meteorite streaking toward the roof or an amorous moose running amok in the parking lot. "
15 " Pac-Man?" The beast looked up at me, oversized fangs giving it an expression that straddled the line between deadly and dopey. A string of drool waved pendulum-like from the jaw, pushing it firmly into the latter category. "When he was a puppy, he tried to eat a ghost," Pallas explained. "
16 " I returned the vial to the book, then surveyed the damage to my library. Angry as I was at Deb’s betrayal, seeing the bullet-ridden texts was worse. It was one thing to shoot at me, but to destroy my books "
17 " Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods and suffered the consequences. I had returned the gift of the gods, and the price had been my dreams. "
18 " Even before I learned what I was, books were my escape from the world. This place . . . bookstores, libraries . . . they’re the closest thing I have to a church. "
19 " the more they evolved from monsters into angsty, sexy superheroes, the more the odds of a human being surviving an encounter with an angry vampire shrank to nothing. "
20 " books were my escape from the world. This place . . . bookstores, libraries . . . they’re the closest thing I have to a church. "
