And what’s a stranger but a friend you haven’t met yet?
We build the stories in our heads. We take words, and we give them power, and we look out through other eyes, and we see, and experience, what they see. I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places?
I was once a blank piece of parchment, too, waiting to be inscribed.
She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.
An April breeze ran across the meadow, stirring the bushes and the trees in one long chilly sigh.
What we read as adults should be read, I think, with no warnings or alerts beyond, perhaps: enter at your own risk.
If the wolves come out of the walls, it’s all over.
As a boy, Fat Charlie had imagined Mrs. Dunwiddy in Equatorial Africa, peering disapprovingly through her thick spectacles at the newly evolved hominids. “Keep out of my front yard,” she would tell a recently evolved and rather nervous specimen of Homo habilis, “or I am going to belt you around your ear hole, I can tell you.
Well, you’re grown-ups,” she said, in a tone of voice that did its best to imply that they weren’t, and that even if they were they shouldn’t be.
Odin’s eye remains in Mimir’s well, preserved by the waters that feed the world ash, seeing nothing, seeing everything. Time.
I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.
Now there were stars overhead, hanging like frozen spears of light, stabbing the night sky.
And once I am there, I shall seek out Watson, if he still lives – and I fancy he does. It is irrational, I acknowledge, and yet I am certain that I would know, somehow, had Watson passed beyond the veil.
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each others’ tragedies.
He could no longer remember his real name. He felt empty and cleansed, in that place that was not a place. He was without form, and void. He was nothing.
People would fight over who owns a poisonous desert, if that desert was Jerusalem.
Everybody has a secret world inside of them.
True madness takes or leaves us in the wood halfway through all our lives.
This is the kind of thing that you wonder about when you make things up for a living. I remain unconvinced that it is the kind of activity that is a fit occupation for an adult, but it’s too late now: I seem to have a career that I enjoy which doesn’t involve getting up too early in the morning.
There. Consider yourself warned. There are so many little triggers out there, being squeezed in the darkness even as I write this. This book is correctly labeled. Now all we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurt’s you. Thank you for coming. Enjoy the things that never happened. Secure your own mask again after you read these stories, but do not forget to help others.