I cannot let a place that is so important to so many people fade away. Something that is wonder and comfort and mystery all together that they have nowhere else. If you had that, wouldn't you want to keep it?

We lead strange lives, chasing our dreams around from place to place.

Something about the circus stirs their souls, and they ache for it when it is absent.

The boy spends most of his time reading. And writing, of course. He copies out sections of books, writes out words and symbols he does not understand at first but that become intimately familiar beneath his ink-stained fingers, formed again and again in increasingly steady lines.

The truest tales require time and familiarity to become what they are.

Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself.

You look like a ghost," Bailey says. He can think of no better way to describe it. "You appear the same way to me, so which of us is real?