“Well, right when you asked me if I had a name I thought, yeah, he’s right, I do need a name. But I wanted to pick a good one, so I read a book called ‘How to Name Your Baby’, and out of a hundred and eighty thousand names that’s the one I liked the best.”
“Once I saw them lying three deep. In a space not exceeding a hundred yards square more than four hundred corpses lay festering. Can you imagine the postures in which man, once created in the image of his Maker, had been twisted? Do not try, for were you to succeed you would ask yourself, with me: ‘Can I ever forget.”
“Hundred of years ago they had climbed through the hills, carrying the few things they owned on their back, looking for somewhere in this strange land that they could claim as their own. They had come from far away, across the sea. They had fought a terrible enemy. On the coast they had heard, from the wandering native people called the Travelers, of a place at the bottom of a forbidden mountain in the high country far inland.”
Historians estimate that this act of selflessness, by preventing the spread of plague, saved hundreds of thousands of lives throughout England. It also tells us that for the next year, people from the surrounding villages left food and supplies outside the town so that Eyam would not starve.
″ ‘It is the most beautiful cat in the whole world,’ said the very old man. ‘I ought to know for I’ve seen hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats but not one was as pretty as this one.’ ”
Meshak is Otis’s oppressed, simpleminded son, who finally discovers an infant he considers special enough to risk saving out of the hundreds who have succumbed to his father’s brutality.
“Just think of the number of prayers flying up to heaven, right at this very instant. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands from the Holy Sepulcher alone. And most of them for money, of course. It’s enough to make you despair.”
“There’s at least a hundred, thought Mrs. Brightner. I don’t dare to go outside... but I have to, because I forgot the blue silk thread. I have to go back to my flat to get it. I’ll just have to be brave... they’re only birds after all. They can’t hurt me...”