Oh, thank goodness! he babbled. I didn't mean it - at least I did, but I don't mean it now, not any more! He flung one arm around Yam and twisted the… - Diana Wynne Jones

That was the trouble with Joris. He was nice. You ended up liking him, whatever you did. Even when you wanted to shake him till his head fell off.

It looks as if you need only enter the field for long enough to recognise the bannus and take hold of it. Then you order it to stop. Fight my way through a mob of dancing girls and snatch the dulcimer off the leading damsel, Reigner Two said morbidly. I can just see myself. I think the fools who invented this thing might have thought of a simpler way to stop it. What's wrong with a red switch?

I have been with the Court all my life, travelling with the King's Progress. I didn't know how to go on. I sat and stared at this sentence, until Grundo said, "If you can't do it, I will." If you didn't know Grundo, you'd think this was a generous offer, but it was a threat really. Grundo is dyslexic. Unless he thinks hard, he writes inside out and backwards. He was threatening me with half a page of crooked writing with words like "inside" turning up as "sindie" and "story" as "otsyr".