Fight The :Empty: [words]

Once, in my father’s bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.

Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.

Even after the entire world has taken me apart, there’s still a part of me left for you.

It’s always a part of my purpose as a storyteller to first create characters that the reader will be anxious for. You can’t be anxious for a character if you don’t care about the character, if you don’t in some way like, respect, or even love the character, or at least have affection for the character. And then, once I’ve established those characters, in whom the reader I hope has some emotional investment, then it’s perversely my job to make as many terrible things happen to those people we like as I can imagine.

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

Seat yourself next to your joy
and have your awakened soul pour wine.

And I hide because there’s more to me than what you see and I’m not sure you’d like the rest. I know that sometimes, I don’t like the rest.

When the day shall come that we do part,” he said softly, and turned to look at me, “if my last words are not ‘I love you’-ye’ll ken it was because I didna have time.