I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.
“
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Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: The Kindly Ones
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Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing and they’re dead before they die.
“
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The Magicians, Lev Grossman
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Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
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The Magician King, Lev Grossman
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But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart’s desire, their dream… But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you what you once wanted.
“
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Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Dream Country
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I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is ‘Disappear Here’ and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light.
“
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Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero
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Stories have changed, my dear boy,” the man in the grey suit says, his voice almost imperceptibly sad. “There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need to rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case. There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficulty to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep overlapping and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there in no telling where and of them may lead. Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story? Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act? Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with its prey.
“
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The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern
It bears repeating that I really, really, REALLY love this book.
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To read for an hour or so at night is to enter a magic realm in which people are more interesting, informed, amusing and intelligent than anyone you encounter in everyday life.
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The Torchlight List, Jim Flynn (via judijone)
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Half the harm that is done in this word
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.
“
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from ‘The Cocktail Party’ by T.S. Eliot (via hermionejg)
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