“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
“So If the water genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Stream of Stories, and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the Ocean began to have an effect on Haroun. ”
“There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue.”
“Haroun went with this father whenever he could, because the man was a magician, it couldn’t be denied. He would climb up on to some little makeshift stage in a dead-end alley packed with raggedy children and toothless old-timers, all squatting in the dust;...”
“That ramp hasn’t been built for Dilsmead Hall in the 21st century. That end of the Tube spent a lot of time in the 16th century. It has easy to tell which end was which, because the end that spend all its time in the 21st was dirty. ”