Do you sometimes feel like you are dreaming, all the time?
We are fish in a bowl, dear.
Create new stories upon the old ones.
It’s lovely, the way wishes are added to it, by lighting candles with ones that are already lit and adding them to the branches. New wishes ignited by old wishes.
Do you ever think about how many stories are out there?′ she asks, placing a finger on the glass. ‘How many dramas are unfolding around us right at this very moment? I wonder how long a book you would need to record them. You’d probably need an entire library to hold a single evening in Manhattan. An hour. A minute.
A multitude of seekers looking for things they do not have names for and finding them in stories written and unwritten and in each other.
Once, very long ago, Time fell in love with Fate.
I also think most of us are two steps away from jumping off something most of the time and you never know if the next day is going to push you in one direction or another.
Everyone wants to be part of a story. Everyone is a part of a story. What they want, is to be part of something worth recording.
It was all a matter of timing,” she says. “My train was late that day. The day I saw you drop your notebook. Had it been on schedule we never would have met. Maybe we were never meant to. It was a possibility, one of thousands, and not inevitable, the way some things are.
Marionettes that control their own strings.
He wishes he had brought the wine-colored book with him, but he is trying to make a point of not having his nose constantly in a book. It is an attempt to appear friendlier that he’s not certain is working yet.
How are you managing to keep everyone from aging?” Celia asks after a while. “Very carefully,” Marco answers. “And they are aging, albeit extremely slowly. How are you moving the circus?” “On a train.” “A train?” Marco asks, incredulous. “The entire circus moved by a single train?” “It’s a large train,” Celia says. “And it’s magic,” she adds, making Marco laugh. “I confess, Miss Bowen, you are not what I had expected.” “I assure you that feeling is mutual.
It doesn’t whisper verses or stories around his tongue and into his head, thankfully, but it tastes older than stories. It tastes like myth.
Celia Bowen sits at a desk surrounded by piles of books. She ran out of space for her library some time ago, but instead of making the room larger she has opted to let the books become the room.
The pirate is a metaphor but also still a person.
There are stories that are more fragile still: For every tale carved in rock there are more inscribed on autumn leaves or woven into spiderwebs. There are stories wrapped in silk so their pages do not fall to dust and stories that have already succumbed, fragments collected and kept in urns.
He tells her about moving from place to place to place and never feeling like he ever belonged in any of them, how wherever he was he would almost always rather be someplace else, preferably somewhere fictional. He tells her how he worries that none of it means anything.
I knew that, and still it surprised me. How long I was willing to wait for something that was only a possibility. I always thought it was just a matter of time, but I was wrong.
She was only wrong by a little bit and a little bit wrong is mostly right.