Celeste > Books: magical-realism‎ (33)

“Books turn people into time travelers, shape shifters, body switchers, mind readers, and immortals, and therefore books are the last great alchemy of our age.”

“The more you love some

“The more you love someone, the more dangerous to you they become. The more you love someone, the more willing you are to show them your throat.”

“Art, true art, exists only to transform. And it is only truly art when it does transform. The maker. The viewer. Everyone.”

“Love opens the city gates wide, and allows all manner of horrors right inside.”

“She said it was a sin to butcher an animal that you didn’t love first.”

“What’s the point of a thing? It doesn’t live or breathe or love. The only value we must keep close to our hearts is the living.”

“Maps are love letters written to times and places their makers had explored.”

“There are worlds where death itself is mal

“There are worlds where death itself is malleable, where anything can be rewritten, be undone, if the right approach is taken. Worlds where the air bleeds words and lightning can rewrite the past.”

“I never wanted to be a hero, but that doesn’t mean I’ll let you turn me into a villain.”

“I am not yours to cling to or to claim.”

“I am not your door… But I might be my own.”

“You can’t say ‘my hands are clean, that means I’m a good guy’ when you let people stand behind you with knives, ready to slash at everyone you say you want to save.”

“Sticks and stones, as the sages say; sticks and stones. I know what I am and I’m happy this way, and saying something true shouldn’t be an insult, ever, because that’s not how words want to work.”

“You’re a monster in a hall of heroes, and we’re going to defeat you. That’s what heroes do. We beat monsters, no matter how much it costs us.”

“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you c

“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”

“Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when was the door closed and locked behind you.”

“The thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.”

“And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”

“Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.”

“I wasn’t destined for greatness; I knew this. But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.”

“From that point on, I guess I sort of realized that my imagination, which made life tolerable, needed to be kept a secret from the rest of the world. But if you keep something hidden away, all tied up, it’s hard to summon it when you really need it.”

“Maybe raising children was just giving them the things you loved most in the world and hoping that they loved them too.”

“You took care of people by not letting them know how badly you wanted your life to be different.”

“A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.”

“To love means to sacrifice everything that you are.”

“Jews always come out battered, bruised, but still triumphant. Because we believe in God, in community, in compassion, and in the power of our people to endure.”

“I get to choose what kind of strong I want to be.”

“I am brave enough to stand for what I believe in—and I believe in you.”

“Listen, not every story is made for telling. Sometimes just by telling a story you’re stealing it, stealing a little of the mystery away from it.”

“If we address stories as archeological sites, and dust through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, mundane and magical. It is at the moment when the doors open, when things flow between worlds, that stories happen.”

“You see, doors are many things: fissures and cracks, ways between, mysteries and borders. But more than anything else, doors are change.”

“I escaped outdoors (see how that word slips into even the most mundane of sentences? Sometimes I feel there are doors lurking in the creases of every sentence, with periods for knobs and verbs for hinges).”

“At this point, you’re thinking that this story isn’t really about Doors, but about those more private, altogether more miraculous doors that can open between two hearts. Perhaps it is in the end—I happen to believe that every story is a love story if you catch it at the right moment, slantwise in the light of dusk—but it wasn’t then.”

“If you are wondering why other worlds seem so brimful of magic compared to your own dreary Earth, consider how magical this world seems from another perspective.”

“Worlds are too complex, too beautifully fractured to be named.”

“Doors, he told her, are change, and change is a dangerous necessity. Doors are revolutions and upheavals, uncertainties and mysteries, axis points around which entire worlds can be turned. They are the beginnings and ending of every true story, the passages between that lead to adventures and madness and—here he smiled—even love. Without doors the world’s would grow stagnant, calcified, storyless.”

Worlds were never meant to be prisons, locked and suffocating and safe. Worlds were supposed to be great rambling houses with all the windows thrown open and the wind and summer rain rushing through them, with magic passages in their closets and secret treasure chests in their attics.”