Here's another thing to remember: hope keeps you alive. Even when you're dead, it's the only thing that keeps you alive.

We're killers, all of us: We kill our lives, our past selves, the things that mattered. We bury them under slogans and excuses.

Something aches at the very core of me, something ancient and deep and stronger than words: the filament that joins each of us to the root of existence, that ancient thing unfurling and resisting and grappling, desperately, for a foothold, a way to stay here, breathe, keep going.

Time and space recede and blast away like a universe expanding forever outward, and leaving only darkness and the two of us on its periphery, darkness and breathing and touch.

Everything ends, people move on, they don't look back. It's how they should be.

It's like there's a filter set up in my brain, except instead of making things better, it twists everything around so what comes out of my mouth is totally wrong, totally different from what I was thinking.

But...books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch. And some of them―the best ones―are doors.