Almost everything is double like that for adolescents; their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall; they see through everything, and are blind.

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

Even a poet cannot get everything right.

If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.

There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.

If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.