Short stories do not say this happened and this happened and this happened. They are a microcosm and a magnification rather than a linear progression.

Cracks especially. You have to be careful of the cracks.. Sometimes they are disguised as something else. A doorway, or a smile or even a winking eye. And if you fall through them, you never know were you will end up.

Maruman does not loll.

Only humans think death is evil. But it is nature. Evil exist's only in life. There is much good and evil alloted to each life.

The deepest wounds aren't the ones we get from other people hurting us. They are the wounds we give ourselves when we hurt other people.

The worst predijudice is unknowing. We think we treat others as equals, but, in our deepest heart, we regard ourselves as superior. In part, this is because we are, in ways, powerful. But that does not make the race of humans (funanga) better than that of the dog or equine.

The mirror had broken into millions of pieces and the wind blew them all over the world. If a person got a speck in their eye, the person would only see the ugly side of things from then on, but if a piece got in their blood and it reached their heart, it would freeze into a solid block of ice and they couldn't feel anything anymore

Laughter is a powerful weapon for it carries the light. To laugh is to defy the darkness.

If human lives be, for their very brevity, sweet, then beast lives are sweeter still...

Sometimes success demands a certain refined insanity.

My heart belongs to you,' He promised. 'Would you have loved me when I was a girl?' 'I have always loved you. Even before I met you I loved the idea of you.

Never trust a mirror,' his mother had told him. 'They never tell the truth unless you make them.

It is better to pursue a hopeless hope than to give in to black despair.

You are born with the yearning arrow, my Glynna, though you are not yet fully aware of it. It is not a happy thing to possess, for nothing on earth - no goal, no person how ever beloved - will answer it. It points to the sky and to the heavens and the stars and when it cannot reach them, it must fall back to pierce your heart.

Life has always been a matter of putting one's feet down carefully

She's forgetting,' Ellen said to Jack, plumping herself down on a chair. 'All of her life is leaking out of her. Soon there will be nothing left.

That was what happened to laughter when you caged it. It became unbearably sad. It was worse than crying.