This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.
Because, she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.’
Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.
Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.
Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!
I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.
That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.
I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.
If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.
There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.
Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.
What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven?
25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying ‘Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?’ 26 And the Angel said, ‘I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.’ 27 And the Lord did not ask him again.
Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People travelled with them.
Normally, in anything I do, I’m fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce.
Not only are there no happy endings,? she told him, ’there aren’t even any endings.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
Beware of Doors.
Hell may have all the best composers, but heaven has all the best choreographers.
You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.