You see with your eyes. This means you can be misled by charm, by outward appearance. By webs of glamour, by surface pretences. I do not see with my eyes. I see good and I see evil. Nothing else.

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.

Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn't a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. "It's all right" we whisper, "I'm here, I love you." and we lie: "I'll never leave you." For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad.

The only water in the forest is the River.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.