Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.

At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.

What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make; I can only undo, unmake.

Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?

If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ...But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.

What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.

The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.

No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.