There's a certain epicness in stories, in quotes, in lives and different worlds that I've always, always wanted to capture. Because I don't want to write just for entertainment, I want to write with meaning. I want you to get that strange, faraway feeling that reality can't touch when you read my books. I want you to set them down and just think, just soak up everything you've seen or done, and simply exist inside that world for a little bit.

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"But even in her laughter there was something missing. She never seemed to be truly happy; she just seemed to be passing time while she waited for something else. She was tired of just existing; she wanted to live."

As of now, though, I can't capture that feeling and trap it between pages. I don't know how. My stories are straight forward: a smattering of dialoque and observations but no real emotion, no real depth. My talent isn't really in storytelling, but in seeing the story.

 

“You know a great many things in dreams, often despite the evidence of your eyes. You just know them. …She wanted to return to her dream. Perhaps it was still there behind her closed eyelids. Perhaps a little of its happiness still clung like gold dust to her lashes.”

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Real life seems so anticlimatic. When you read a book, everything flows so perfectly, and everything is so vibrant and brave. When in your entire life do you have a chance to die for someone, to sacrifice everything to save someone, to be a hero in an impossible adventure? You could put me in the middle of a dream, and I would fare, but in the middle of life? Who am I then?

 

"Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory."

Even the things I dream in real life take on a strangely fantastical sheen, as if they're things of fairytales. Because even anger, even hate in that world is perfect. Life, awareness, is not. It simply is, but the worlds you create between the pages of a book can be, in a way reality never could.

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"For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die."

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"Most people think things are not real unless they are spoken, that it's the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, that legitimizes it. I suppose this is why people always want other people to say "I love you." I think just the opposite—that thoughts are realest when thought, that expressing them distorts or dilutes them."
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"This was not a faerie tale. This was not the movies. This was life. It hurt more. It was excruciating. It was excruciatingly beautiful."

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"I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains,, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - unless it be to share our laughter."

 

Now seems so seperate from real life, from petty emotions and childhood drama, from ignorance and pain. Now, right now, seems full of sparkling afternoon light and magic. This feeling can't be put into a book because it's too big to be trapped in words, to be trapped in a mundane story. You have to see and feel the story without telling it, because when you tell it, the magic is lost.

 

"When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists."

 

“Somewhere, things must be beautiful and vivid. Somewhere else, life has to be beautiful and vivid and rich. Not like this muted palette- a pale blue bedroom, washed out sunny sky, dull green yellow brown of the fields. Here, I know every twist of the road, every blade of grass, every face in this town, and I am suffocating.”

 

"I hadn't understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' still had any meaning for me."

 

I've become somewhat numb, as if immune to the touches of the outside world. Time just slips away, and what is now is suddenly yesterday, two weeks ago, a month, a year. I barely notice it, I can't feel it, can't get attached. I simply am, and I simply see. Only some moments are clear, and they are so fleeting that they become just memories too.

 

"I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me."

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"Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit."