All I wanted, even when I hated you most, was some poor, barren, parched excuse to love you. But you only gave me riddles.

Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.

Only yesterday a young woman came to me wanting a trap set for a man with a sweet smile and lithe arms. She was a fool, not for wanting him, but for wanting more of him than that.

The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.

She is our moon. Our tidal pull. She is the rich deep beneath the sea, the buried treasure, the expression in the owl's eye, the perfume in the wild rose. She is what the water says when it moves.

But you must stop playing among his ghosts -- it's stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He's trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It's not nice, and it's not fair.

Research the imagination. It was as obsolete as the appendix in most adults, except for those in whom, like the appendix, it became inflamed for no reason.