Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know.

Words can be worrisome, poeple complex, motives and manners unclear, grant her the wisdom to choose her path right, free from unkindness and fear.

You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.

There are stories you build and there are stories you construct; then there are the stories that you hack out of rock removing all the things that are not the story.

Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.

We owe it to each other to tell stories.