Frightened people live in their own special hell. You could say they make it themselves, but they can’t help it. It’s the way they’re built. They deserve sympathy and compassion.
I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between.
Everyone should have this, he thought, and perhaps, at the end, everyone does. Perhaps in their time of dying, everyone rises.
When I die, I guess I’ll go with a library card in one hand and an OVERDUE stamp in the other. Well, maybe there’s worse ways.
I write for love, but love doesn’t pay the bills.
I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics... culture... history... aren’t those natural ingredients in any story, if it’s told well? I mean... ′ He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. ‘I mean... can’t you guys just let a story be a story?
Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.
People are blind to explanations that lie outside their perception of reality.
If our faith is strong, we’ll go to heaven, and we’ll understand the whole thing when we get there. As if life were a joke, and heaven the place where the cosmic punchline is finally explained to us.
This is how we bring about our own damnation, you know-by ignoring the voice that begs us to stop. To stop while there’s still time.
And you, CONSTANT READER. Thank God you’re still there after all these years. If you’re having fun, I am, too.
Maybe people really don’t change as much as we think. Maybe they just... maybe they just stiffen up.
He wanted to tell Luke that he loved him. But there were no words, and maybe no need of them. Or telepathy. Sometimes a hug was telepathy.
At three in the morning the blood runs slow and thick, and slumber is heavy. The soul either sleeps in blessed ignorance of such an hour or gazes about itself in utter despair. There is no middle ground.
I think that, even if we forget each other, we’ll remember in our dreams.
Life is a wheel, and it always comes back around to where it started.
Books were escape. Books were freedom.
I find I’m so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it is the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.
He didn’t know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously liberating: he didn’t care. He was very tired of thinking and thinking and still not knowing. He was also tired of being frightened, like a man who has entered a cave on a lark and now begins to suspect he is lost. Stop thinking about it, then. That’s the solution.
So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.