This is not a place, after all. It is BETWEEN places. This is NOWHERE. A brief thought: I could stay here, abandon my quest, hang forever in the void, safe and cold and alone.

They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.

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.

Everything that is,casts a shadow

You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.

Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

And there are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.' 'They kill themselves, you mean?' said Bod. [...] 'Indeed.' 'Does it work? Are they happier dead?' 'Sometimes. Mostly, no. It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.