And I guess that's when it starts to hit me: the whole point is, you do what you can.

Requiem has been controversial because people dont feel I gave it closure.

But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.

Direction, like time, is a general thing, the deprived of boundaries and borders. It is an endless process interception and reinterception, doubling back and adjusting.

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.

...if you are one tardy away from missing out on a big competition, you should probably make your coffee at home.

They haven't killed us yet," I say, and I imagine that one day I will fly a plane over Portland, over Rochester, over every fenced-in city in the whole country, and I will bomb and bomb and bomb, and watch all their buildings smoldering to dust, and all those people melting and bleeding into flame, and I will see how they like it. If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit. This is the way the world is made now.