Are the stories we tell ourselves true or based on what we dream them to be?

Hope springs eternal. Just remember: so does evil. Sometimes they are impossible to tell apart.

He knows that when she passes, a grief will rip through him unlike anything he has ever known. Preparing for it doesn’t help. He just knows it will come. It is like realizing you are sailing a boat across an ocean and soon you will find the other shore- it will be just you and acres of dry, blinding white sand. There may be trees on that island, and sun, and food, but none of it will feel or taste right, because you will stand there and realize: I am alone.

It is meaning that drives most people forward into time, and it is meaning that reminds them of the past, so they know where they are in the universe.

The look in her eyes is of a person who drank from the end of a gun barrel and found it delicious.

Everything was sacred when nothing was taken for granted, she thinks ruefully.

Time is measured in meaning.

The guards hate the priest. To them, men like the priest paper the sky with romantic tissue-paper legends, but down here below the earth, in this enchanted place, we know life cannot be contained on a slogan or a prayer tablet. We know that kindness rules with the fist and chains rule with a turn to the sky, that all humans require penance and without it we all seek punishment, over and over again, until the body and mind are satisfied and we die.

Even monsters need a person who truly wants to listen – to hear – so that someday we might find the words that are more than boxes.

Everyone was harmless until you knew better.