Have you thought about what it means to be a god?" asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. "It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.

It doesn't matter that I can't remember the details any longer: death happened to her. Death happens to all of us.

Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.

I think most things are pretty magical, and that it's less a matter of belief than it is one of just stopping to notice.

The lower you start, the more opportunities you have.

He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.