The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.

You shone like a star. The funniest, wisest writer & the finest friend

Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

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.

There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.