Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings

Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.

Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.

The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.