We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. We have an obligation to use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.
I would go to Australia, at the bottom of the world,” said Tristran, “and bring you. Um.” He ransacked the penny dreadfuls in his head, trying to remember if any of their heroes had visited Australia. “A kangaroo,” he said. “And opals,” he added. He was fairly certain about the opals.
If you’re in a dream, and you know it’s a dream, then nothing in the dream can hurt you. Right?
The most recent books have shown Terry in a new mode – books like Night Watch and Monstrous Regiment are darker, deeper, more outraged at what people can do to people, while prouder of what people can do for each other.
When you create yourself from scratch you need a model of some kind, something to aim towards or head away from – all the things you want to be, or intentionally want not to be.
The message had come during “The Golden Girls,” one of Crowley’s favorite television programs. Rose had taken ten minutes to deliver what could have been quite a brief communication, and by the time non-infernal service was restored Crowley had quite lost the thread of the plot.
Teach me to hear mermaids singing.
They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over.
Maps of Faerie are unreliable, and may not be depended upon.
The monk made his evening devotions with slightly less enthusiasm than usual. It is one thing to pray; it is another to pray to entities who will search you out on the road and beat you across the head with sticks if you say something that offends them.
Call no man happy until he is dead. Herodotus.
Ideas, written ideas, are special. They are the way we transmit our stories and our ideas from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human. And fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.
But you will remember it, in the soft, lost, slumbering moments between waking and true sleep: remember the whispering voices of the Gods of Earth and Heaven, the piping laughter of innocent chaos, the frightened rusting of cold order... the voices of the living. The voices of the dead. They will haunt your sleep until you die.
You cannot seek Destruction and return unscathed.
The piranhas said nothing, but they thrashed about in their bowl, ominously.
He decided not to tell anyone what he was planning, on the not entirely unreasonable basis that they would have told him not to do it.
Ask yourselves, all of you... What power would Hell have if those here imprisoned were not able to dream of Heaven?
I’m not frightened, she told herself, and as she thought it she knew it was true. There was nothing here that frightened her. These things – even the thing in the cellar – were illusions, things made by the other mother in a ghastly parody of the real people and real things on the other end of the corridor. She could not truly make anything, decided Coraline. She could only twist and copy and distort things that already existed.
All of my life I’ve been attracted by the idea of being a writer, but like all writers I don’t so much like writing as having written.
I do not recommend revenge. It tends to have repercussions.