A Quiet Journal

“Be brave. Be bold. Be loud. Never change for anyone but yourself. Any soul worth their star-stuff will take the whole package as is and however it grows. Don’t waste your time on anyone who doesn’t believe you when you tell them how you feel.”

“This was not the frustration one feels at waking from a sweet dream. It was the desolation of having found the place that fits, the one true place, and experiencing the first heady sigh of rightness before being torn away and cast back into random, lonely scatter.”

“It was new to both of them—this nearness that mingles breath and warmth—and they shared the sensation that they were absorbing each other, melting together in an exquisite crucible. It was an intimacy both had imagined, but never—they both knew—successfully. The truth was so much better than the fantasy. The wild, soft wings were in a frenzy. Sarai couldn’t think. She wanted only to keep on melting.”

“And so Grief and Shame abided in adjoining rooms with the door shut between them, holding their pain in their arms instead of each other.”

“Two warriors with their faces in their hands. Sarai, watching them, could see that everything would be better if the faces and hands were to simply…switch places. That is, if Azareen were told hold Eril-Fane while he held her.

“I lived seven years inside these books. My body may have been going about its duties in the library, but my mind was here. Do you know what they called me? Strange the dreamer. I was barely aware of my surroundings half the time.

“Sarai felt…thinned out. To be so tired was like evaporating. Water to vapor. Flesh to ghost. Bit by bit, from the surface inward, you feel yourself begin to disappear, or at least to be translated into another state—from a tangible one, blood and spirit, to a kind of lost and drifting mist.”

“The function of hate was to stamp out compassion—to close a door in one’s own self and forget it was ever there. If you had hate, then you could see suffering—and cause it—and feel nothing except perhaps a sordid vindication.”

“The sight of a strong, bare arm crooked gently around a waist or shoulder could make her ache with the yearning to be held. To be one of a pair of bodies that knew that melting fusion. To reach and find. To be reached for and found. To belong to a mutual certainty.

“You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable. Something beautiful and full of monsters.”

“What could he say? How could he convey the hours—hundreds of hours—spent bent over ledgers, his eyes swimming in the dim light of a dull glave while his mind traced the abaresques and coils of an alphabet that looked like music sounded? How could he explain that it had for his mind as nothing else ever had, like numbers to a mathematician, or air to a flute? He couldn’t.”

“And as for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths—intrusions of reality into fantasy, like…toast crumbs on a wizard’s beard.”

“Here, captured between covers, was the history of the human imagination, and nothing had ever been more beautiful, or fearsome, or bizarre. Here were spells and curses and myths and legends, and Strange the dreamer had for so long fed his mind on them that if one could wander into it, they would discover a fantasia.”

“Your spirit shouldn’t be ‘fine’. It should be effervescent.”

“The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around”

“Losing your way is oftentimes the only way to find something you did not know you were looking for.”

“I have found beauty in all manner of broken things. Chairs. Buildings. People. Especially people. They shatter in the most fascinating ways. Every dent, scratch, and crack tells a story. Invisible scars hide the deepest wounds and are the most interesting.”