I don't believe in hell. The idea that a supreme being would make hell is ridiculous. An eternity of pain that results in no learning, reformation or rebirth is a nauseating idea. It's one of the reasons I left Christianity. I simply could not accept that version of God.

But I still did not realize how mad she was, and how accustomed to dreaming; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed reality to her dreams, a demon elf feeding her spinning wheel with the reeds of the world so she might make her own weblike universe.

There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles.

What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.

But just remember, life without me would be even more unbearable.

We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.

All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to man and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the earth was new to man, and wondrous. But always we come back to the way the earth is now.