Going to China

...But it gradually seemed to me that I'd made myself believe something that wasn't true. I'd made myself believe that I was fine and happy and fulfilled on my own without the love of anyone else. Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I'd spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn't matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit... And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without feeling that again? I thought: Iwant to go to China. It's full of treasures and strangeness and mysteries and joy.

~Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

Stories

Stories are the most important thing in the world.

Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.

~Philip Pullman

Meaning

The world existed to be read. And I read it.

~L.S. Schwartz, Ruined by Reading

Limitless

I dreamt a limitless book,

A book unbound,

Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance

On every line there was a new horizon drawn,

New heavens supposed;

New states, new souls.

~Clive Barker, Abarat

any good?

The reason I wanted to kill him was because I stood there and let him walk that boy out in the trees and shoot him and I never said nothin.

Would it have done any good?

No sir. But that don't make it right.

~Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Wild Animals.

The other horses flared and bunched and looked back wildly. Before the colt could struggle up John Grady had squatted on its neck and pulled its head up and to one side and was holding the horse by the muzzle with the long bony head pressed against his chest and the hot sweet breath of it flooding up from the dark wells of its nostrils over his face and neck like news from another world. 

They did not smell like horses.

They smelled like what they were, wild animals. 

~Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

That Resonance

That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wild flowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses  and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised. 


-Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses



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The Reality of the Unreal

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies, that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die, but things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on forever and ever.

~Chuck Palahniuk


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If People Were Rain

I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep... Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

~John Green, Looking for Alaska


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The Heart of a Star

"So what I want to know is why it is that I can no longer find you, in my mind. You are still there, just, but you are there like a ghost, a will o' the wisp. Not long ago you burned--your heart burned--in my mind like silver fire. But after that night in the inn it became patchy and dim, and now it is not there at all."

Yvaine realized that she felt nothing but pity for the creature who had wanted her dead, so she said, "Could it be that the heart you seek is no longer my own?"

The old woman coughed.

The star waited for her to be done, and then she said, "I have given my heart to another."

"The boy? The one in the inn? With the unicorn?"

"Yes."

"You should have let me take it back then, for my sisters and me. We could have been young again, well into the next age of the world. Your boy will break it, or waste it, or lose it. They all do."

"Nonetheless," said the star, "he has my heart."

~Neil Gaiman, Stardust


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He nodded, and stumbled away from her;
he did not need to ask how she knew his name;
she had taken it from him along with certain other things,
such as his heart,
when he had kissed her.

Neil Gaiman, Stardust

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Night

Through the casement he watched the night advancing in the heavens: and Night became personal to him--seeming like a queen walking into exile, with melancholy on her brow, while Venus, the diamond clasp of her mourning gown, gleamed there above the trees, alone, lost in the depths of azure.

~Vera, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

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fate

Let the heavens fall, let the tides of the sea engulf her, what can it matter, she has had her fill.

-Victor Hugo

Les Miserables