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

jean valjean

Jean Valjean wept for a long time, and sobbed with more weakness than a woman, more terror than a child. While he wept, the light grew brighter in his brain, an extraordinary light, at once ravishing and terrible.

...

He looked at his life, and it appeared to him horrible; at his soul, and it appeared to him frightful. Still a soft light was shed over both, and he fancied that he saw Satan by the light of paradise.

-Victor Hugo

Les Misérables

blind dogs

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. the crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

....

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.

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On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

....

In that cold corridor they had reached the point of no return which was measured from the first solely by the light they carried with them.

....

I want to be with you.
You cant.
Please.
You cant. You have to carry the fire.
I dont know how to.
Yes you do.
Is it real? The fire?
Yes it is.
Where is it? I dont know where it is.
Yes you do. It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it.

-Cormac McCarthy
 The Road

boxes

"He made the boxes because he was lonely. He didn't have anyone to love, and he made the boxes so he could love them, and so people would know that he existed, and because birds are free and the boxes are hiding places for the birds so they will feel safe, and he wanted to be free and be safe. The boxes are for him so he can be a bird."

-Audrey Niffenegger

The Time Traveler's Wife

Alone

You cannot fully read a book without being alone. But through this very solitude you become intimately involved with people whom you might never have met otherwise, because they have been dead for centuries or because they spoke languages you cannot understand. And nonetheless, they have become your closest friends, your wisest advisors, the wizards that hypnotize you, the lovers you have always dreamed of.

~Antonio Munoz Molinas, "The Power of the Pen"


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