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Perhaps (I hypothesised freely) the Prophet believed that the fifteen people who inhabited my Halls should be counted as one set of People, while in the Far Distant Halls there lived another set and he ought to be counted as one of them. Perhaps among his own People he was the Third Person or the Tenth. Perhaps he was even some dizzyingly high number like the Seventy-Fifth Person!

But I digress into what is surely fantasy.

— Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

I owe so much to the Other’s generosity. Without him I would not sleep snug and warm in my sleeping bag in Winter. I would not have notebooks in which to record my thoughts.

That being said, it occurs to me to wonder why it is that the House gives a greater variety of objects to the Other than to me, providing him with sleeping bags, shoes, plastic bowls, cheese sandwiches, notebooks, slices of Christmas cake etc., etc., whereas me it mostly gives fish.

— Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Birds are not difficult to understand. Their behaviour tells me what they are thinking. Generally it runs along the lines of: Is this food? Is this? What about this? This might be food. I am almost certain that this is. Or occasionally: It is raining. I do not like it.

— Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Since the World began it is certain that there have existed fifteen people. Possibly there have been more; but I am a scientist and must proceed according to the evidence. Of the fifteen people whose existence is verifiable, only Myself and the Other are now living.

— Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Was it more honourable to starve than to steal? Many people would say yes, though rarely those who’d actually experienced an empty belly, or a child whimpering with its own hunger. Was it more honourable to starve than to steal when others had the means to feed you but chose not to, unless you paid with money you did not have? He thought not. By choosing to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for having the temerity to be poor, when by rights that ought to be a constable’s job. Show any initiative or imagination and you were called lazy, shifty, crafty, incorrigible. So he’d dismissed talk of honour; it was just a way of making the rich and powerful feel better about themselves and the powerless and poverty-stricken feel worse.

— Matter by Iain M. Banks (Culture, #8)