I am NOT alone. I am accompanied by a large cat and a small girl.
Loki was trying to look serious, but even so, he was smiling at the corners of his mouth. It was not a reassuring smile.
She was the storm, she was the lightning...
I found myself thinking of an ocean running beneath the whole universe, like the dark seawater that laps beneath the wooden boards of an old pier: an ocean that stretches from forever to forever and is still small enough to fit inside a bucket, if you have Old Mrs. Hempstock to help you get it in there, and you ask nicely.
I am sorry. I lost something there. Like a path I was walking that dead-ended, and now I am alone and lost in the forest, and I am here and I do not know where here is any more.
We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it. An obligation not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not to leave our children with a world we’ve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.
So be wise. And if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise and then just behave like they would. Now go, and make interesting mistakes. Make Interesting. Mistakes. Make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for you being here. Make good art.
Coraline went over to the window and watched the rain come down. It wasn’t the kind of rain you could go out in – it was the other kind, the kind that threw itself down from the sky and splashed where it landed. It was rain that meant business, and currently its business was turning the garden into a muddy, wet soup.
Fiction builds empathy. Fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.
I was once a blank piece of parchment too, waiting to be inscribed. I learned about things and people from stories, and I learned about other authors from stories.
I suppose I could claim that I had suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a bad cover for something deeper and weirder and infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already know the truth. But I think that’s just how the world has always been. And even now I know the truth, the world still seems cheap and shoddy. Different world, different shoddy, but that’s how it feels.
We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams into words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.
Not forever-after, for Time, the thief, eventually takes all things into his dusty storehouse.
In truth, Kipling’s politics are not mine. But then, it would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with people who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place.
Poe isn’t for everyone. He’s too heady a draught for that. He may not be for you. But there are secrets to appreciating Poe, and I shall let you in on one of the most important ones: read him aloud.
Behind them were the lights of the market, the lanterns and candles and witch-lights and fairy glitter, like a dream of the night sky brought down to earth.
It is the job of the creator to explode. It is the task of the academic to walk around the bomb site, gathering up the shrapnel, to figure out what kind of an explosion it was, who was killed, how much damage it was meant to do and how close it came to actually achieving that.
I loved to love what she loved.
I’ll die soon. But the last twenty minutes have been the best years of my life.
One of the dwarfs walked in front of Thor to get a better view of the prye, and Thor kicked him irritably into the middle of the flames, which made Thor feel slightly better and made all the dwarfs feel much worse.