Symbols are for interpretation, not definition.
I think the best stories feel like they’re still going, somewhere, out in story space.
Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are.
This is what his mother would call a moment with meaning. A moment that changes the moments that follow.
You want a place to be like it was in the book but it’s not a place in a book it’s just words. The place in your imagination is where you want to go and that place is imaginary.
Do you believe in the mystical, the fantastical, the improbable, or the impossible? Do you believe that things others dismiss as dreams and imagination actually exist? Do you believe in fairy tales?
For every tale carved in rock there are more inscribed on autumn leaves or woven into spiderwebs.
But the story wanted an ending. Endings are what give stories meaning.
We’re here to wander through other people’s stories, searching for our own.
Their story is only just beginning. And no story ever truly ends as long as it is told.
Important things hurt sometimes.
I think people came here for the same reason we came here,” Dorian says. “In search of something. Even if we didn’t know what it was. Something more. Something to wonder at. Someplace to belong. We’re here to wander through other people’s stories, searching for our own.
He has untangled himself from vines blossoming with story-filled flowers. He has traversed piles of abandoned teacups with text baked into their crackled glaze. He has walked through puddles of ink and left footprints that formed stories in his wake that he did not turn around to read.
The weather. It’s like a poem. Where each word is more than one thing at once and everything’s a metaphor. The meaning condensed into rhythm and sound and the spaces between sentences. It’s all intense and sharp, like the cold and the wind.” “You could just say it’s cold out.” “I could.
You wish to sail the Starless Sea and breathe the haunted air.
I have literally always been the kid who believes in fairy tales but I didn’t know what to do because I wasn’t a kid, I was a twenty-something in a cocktail bar who never feels old enough to drink.
Climbing is not for girls.” “Anything is for girls.
I think the best stories feel like they’re still going, somewhere, out in story space. I remember wondering if this story was an analogy about people who stay in places or relationships or whatever situations longer than they should because they’re afraid of letting go or moving on or the unknown, or how people hold on to things because they miss what the thing was even if that isn’t what that same thing is now.
I do not care for stars. Stars are made of spite and regret.
He tells her how he worries that none of it means anything. That none of it is important. That who he is, or who he thinks he is, is just a collection of references to other people’s art and he is so focused on story and meaning and structure that he wants his world to have all of it neatly laid out and it never, ever does and he fears it never will. He tells her things he has never told anyone.