The Pit: "One night in August she lay awake, with the little moon above like a paper moon, reading Romiosini, listening and listening to Homer, her only record on her first record player. Then she took the record, shoved it into a plastic bag, and hid it under the fridge's base. She looked at her books and didn't know where to store them. Her mother was sleeping in the next room. At dawn, the doorbell rang. She stuck her head out the window and saw them. As they climbed the marble staircase and then the spiral metal roof, she managed to tell her mother not to be scared, they are coming to arrest me, but it is important not to be frightened, please...

Some People: "The moon had risen and the beggar woman might have been sitting in her tattered dress, the lament for her clearly heard, and you would get anxious wondering if it was the cry of Antonakena who had also become a beggar, just like in that tale of the mother with her only daughter bathed in moonlight and her nine sons..."

Athopetou: "In every language, in every dialect, they call me differently, and each city and each village has its own version of me, I was the one discarded in the ashes, until they made me the famous velvet fairy tale, and the time came when I no longer wanted to be the lucky one in the fairy tale. I want to be a wanderer..."

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]