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