There are those who dance the notes and those who dance the music.

— Eva Ibbotson

Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theater, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air.

— Eva Ibbotson