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"The emotion we feel in fairy-tales when the characters are granted their wishes is a strange one. We feel the possible leap of freedom - I can have what I want - and preserve certainty that this will change nothing; that Fate is fixed." -Gillian

The atmosphere, he told her, had always been full of unseen beings - unseen by her kind - and still was. But it now needed to be negotiated. It is a bad, said the djinn, in the upper air as in bottles. I cannot spread my wings.

Hotel rooms have often the illusory presence of a magician's stage set - and this spick-and-span temporariness is part of the charm.

"It is because I am a woman, I cannot get out of here, I must sit here and wait for my fate, if only I were not a woman I could go out and do something - " all in monotone.

"There are no slaves, we no longer have slaves - at least not in the West and not in Turkey - we are all free," said Gillian, regretting this simplification as soon as it was uttered.

- memory had certain things also in common with dreams; it re-arranged, it made clear, simple narratives, certainly it invented as well as recalling.

Time passes differently in the solitude of hotel rooms. The mind expands, but lazily, and the body contracts in its bright box of space.

" - she liked glad in general, for its paradoxical nature, translucent as water, heavy as stone, invisible as air, solid as earth." (page 179)

"Istanbul is a meeting-place for many cultures." -Orhan

- there is and old saying "he who has no genies when he walks in the streets wears a headache like a garment".

For the stories of women's lives in fiction are the stories of stopped energies - the stories of Fanny Price, Lucy Snowe, even Gwendolen Harleth, are the stories of Griselda, and all come to that moment of strangling, willed oblivion.

And consider this, said Gillian Perholt at this point in the story: in almost all stories of promises and prohibitions, the promises and prohibitions carry with them the inevitability of failure, of their own breaking.

Such wonderful, such amazement, are the opposite, the exact opposite, of boredom, and many people only know them after fear and loss.

How can you tell who's a pilot at a party?

Because he will tell you.

"Just remember though: like most headlines, not everything you hear behind those "sound-proof" curtains is true."