Passages and Pages

Sometimes, he thought to himself in a house in a cerulean sea, you were able to choose the life you wanted. And if you were of the lucky sort, sometimes that life chose you back.

Funny how that works out, isn't it? That we can find the most unexpected things when we aren't even looking for them.

Why can't life work whatever way we want it to? What's the point of living if you only do it how others want you to?

'I'm afraid I don't have magic.' 'You do, Mr. Baker. Arthur told me that there can be magic in the ordinary.'

It's the little things, I expect. Little treasures we find without knowing their origin. And they come when we least expect them. It's beautiful, when you think about it.

I think...it's like one of Theodore's buttons. If you asked him why he cared about them so, he would tell you it's because they exist at all.

'Arthur says that we should always make time for the things that we like,' Talia said, 'If we don't, we might forget how to be happy. Are you not happy, Mr. Baker?'

I have other things to think about. Like tomorrow. Why is it that I must always worry about tomorrows?

Calliope, a thing of evil, sat on the edge of his bed, black tail twitching as she watched him with bright green eyes. She started purring. In most cats, it would be a soothing sound. In Calliope, it indicated devious plotting involving nefarious deeds.

But January, sometimes life is very hard. Sometimes it demands so much of you that you start losing pieces of yourself as you stretch out to give what the world wants to take.

That was what I'd always loved about reading, what had driven me to write in the first place. That feeling that a new world was being spun like a spiderweb around you and you couldn't move until the whole thing had revealed itself to you.

The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil — rich, fertile soil.

She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale. She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying their best. And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.

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

She didn't tell him that while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond. According to science you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.

But she'd been feeling lonely. And though she'd studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.

That's where you're wrong. The illusion that the self is separate from the rest of the world is the driving factor that limits our potential. Once you realize there's nothing special about the self, it becomes easier to manipulate.