He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity.
Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way.
Go get your heart broken.
You people always hold onto old identities, old faces and masks, long after they’ve served their purpose. But you’ve got to learn to throw things away eventually.
I suspect that most authors don’t really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so.
I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist – books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.
I suppose the point you grow up is the point you let the dreams go.
You don’t want to ask after the health of anyone, if you’re a funeral director. They think maybe you’re scouting for business.
I walk across the dreaming sands under the pale moon: through the dreams of countries and cities, past dreams of places long gone and times beyond recall.
As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.
I knew enough about adults to know that if did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe me when I told the truth anyway.
That’s the trouble with living things. Don’t last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.
How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow.
It doesn’t matter that I can’t remember the details any longer: death happened to her. Death happens to all of us.
But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.
Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you’re going to muck about here.
Idris: Are all people like this? The Doctor: Like what? Idris: So much bigger on the inside.
I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.
There’s this thing, they have in french: L’espirit d’escalier. The spirit of the stairway. I don’t think we have a word for it in English. It means, well, the clever things to say that you only think to yourself when you’re on the way out.
It’s only a world, after all, and they’re just sand grains in the desert, worlds.