Hunchbacks danced at my wedding for luck. It's a thing you don't see nowadays.

Are we human because we gaze at the stars or do we gaze at the stars because we are human?

Until that moment she had never thought she could do it. Never thought she would be brave enough or scared enough, or desperate enough to dare.

Reading is important. Books are important. Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)

She decides to make a list of the things that make her happy. She writes 'plum-blossom' at the top of a piece of paper. Then she stares at the paper, unable to think of anything else. Eventually it begins to get dark.

He was having more fun than a barrelful of monkeys.* *Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noises, and eventually, once the noises had stopped and the monkeys were no longer doing anything at all—except possibly on an organic level—had needed to be disposed of in the dead of night.

If you go to space, you'll look down and see no national boundaries. You'll never see the gods people are killing each other over, but they're incredibly real.