'Hugo smiled, and then Isabelle wound up the mouse. They watched it skitter across the counter.
[...] “Did you ever notice that all machines are made for some reason?” he asked Isabelle. “they are built to make you laugh, like the mouse here, or to tell the time, like clocks, or to fill you with wonder, like the automation. Maybe that’s why a broken machine always makes me a little sad, because it isn’t able to do what it was meant to do.”
Isabelle picked up the mouse, wound it again, and set it down.
“Maybe it’s the same with people,” Hugo continued. “If you lose your purpose . . . it’s like you’re broken.”'
'“It’s so beautiful,” said Isabelle. “It looks like the whole city is made out of stars.”
“Sometimes I come up there at night, even when I’m bot fixing the clocks, just to look at the city. I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire word is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.”'
Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, publisher: Scholastic Press
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