Augustus, perhaps you’d like to share your fears with the group.” “My fears?” “Yes.” “I fear oblivion,” he said without a moment’s pause. “I fear it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.” “Too soon,” Isaac said, cracking a smile. “Was that insensitive?” Augustus asked. “I can be pretty blind to other people’s feelings.

Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

That's the mystery, isn't it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape---the world or the end of it?

but there was nothing I could do to dim the supernovae exploding inside my brain, an endless chain of intra cranial firecrackers

The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.

We fell. We got up. We ran.

Always' was a promise! How can you just break the promise?" "Sometimes people don't always understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said. Isaac shot me a look. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?" I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.