Wishes don’t just come true. They’re only the target you paint around what you want. You still have to hit the bull’s-eye yourself.
Have you ever asked yourself, do monsters make war, or does war make monsters? I’ve seen things, angel. There are guerrilla armies that make little boys kill thier own families. Such acts rip out the soul and make space for beasts to grow inside. Armies need beasts, don’t they? Pet beasts, to do their terrible work! And the worst part is, it’s almost impossible to retrieve a soul that has been ripped away. Almost.” He gave Akiva a keen look.“But it can be done, if ever... if ever you decide to go looking for yours.
He had loved the library, and had felt, as a boy, as though it had a kind of sentience, and perhaps loved him back. But even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.
As for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths – intrusions of reality into fantasy, like toast crumbs on a wizard’s beard.
There comes a certain point with a hope or a dream, when you either give it up or give up everything else. And if you choose the dream, if you keep on going, then you can never quit, because it’s all you are.
On the occasions that he did look up from the page, he would seem as though he were awakening from a dream.
If you’re afraid of your own dreams, you’re welcome here in mine.
Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It’s just that when they do them, they call it justice.
He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant.
He wasn’t an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about.
It’s the mind. It’s the most complex and astonishing thing there is, that there’s a world inside each of us that no one else can ever know or see or visit.
And they gazed at themselves in it, side by side and hand in hand, and they beheld neither gods nor monsters. They were so nearly unchanged, and yet that one thing – the color of their skin – would, in the real world, change everything.
What’s a horizon?′ Lazlo asked, straight-faced. ‘Is it like the end of an aisle of books?
It was a different life out here, but make no mistake: Lazlo was every bit the dreamer he had always been, if not more. He might have left his books, but he carried all his stories with him.
People are our safe places. I have one: a person who’s a home and a world to me.
It was cruel. Like opening a birdcage to let the bird fly out, whilst all the while it’s tethered by the leg, and freedom is only an illusion.
I would have chosen you, if they had let me choose.
He drifted about with his head full of myths, always at least half lost in some otherland of story. Demons and wingsmiths, seraphim and spirits, he love it all.
We’re all on the same side. Even her. You can be on the same side and have different ideas.
Vengeance ought to be spoken through gritted teeth, spittle flying, the cords of one’s soul so entangled in it that you can’t let it go, even if you try. If you feel it – if you really feel it – then you speak it like it’s a still-beating heart clenched in your fist and there’s blood running down your arm, dripping off your elbow, and you can’t let go.