"In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?"

"Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads."

"it keeps happening: i forget - but only for a fraction of a second - and then the truth slams back into me, so hard that i expect the people around me to be shaken by it too. no one warns anyone about this situation. they should be explaining it to you from the moment you’re born, they should brand the idea into your head, they should tell us the truth about death.

how horrific and final it really feels - and how alone you will be with the horror. and how you will forget for just a second, and when you remember again, it’s like remembering that the sun has been extinguished."

"Now I can tell you, kind reader, that I have occasionally managed (and perhaps you have had similar experiences) to catch fairy-tale figures just at the moment when these airy phantasms of the excited spirit were about to dissolve into nothingness, and to give them such clear outlines that every eye with the power to see such things beheld them in real life, and believed in them accordingly. This may have encouraged me to continue openly my convivial intercourse with a veriety of extraordinary figures and a plethora of wild and weird images, and to invite even the gravest readers into this strange and colourful company. You will scarcely, my dearest reader, mistake my courage for mere love of michief, but see in it rather my pardonable eagerness to lure you out of the narrow confines of everyday life and to let you enjoy yourself as you please in an unfamiliar region. Yet this region, after all, is enclosed within the realm which, in true life and being, the human spirit governs according to its own pleasure."

"All things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams."

"You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened."

"In Art there is only one thing that counts; the thing you can’t explain."

"Would that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother, that so it might be, we could glorify them, without including their ostensible authors."

"Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before."

"Diamonds were nothing more than carbon, but carbon in a crystal lattice that made it the hardest known mineral in nature. That was the way we all were headed. I was sure of it. We were destined to be diamonds!

How exciting it was to think that long after the world had ended, whatever was left of our bodies would be transformed into a dazzling blizzard of diamond dust, blowing out towards eternity in the red glow of a dying sun.

"

"Storytellers make us remember what mankind would have been like, had not fear, and the failing will, and the laws of nature tripped up its heels."

"A coincidence is sometimes just the world’s way of getting your attention - a way of getting you to sit up and take notice once in a while. Some coincidences are so slight as to barely merit a raised eyebrow. Others carry such weight that, when acted upon accordingly, they have the power to change the course of your life."