While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.

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

First sentences are doors to worlds.

The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.