A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

No one's the monster in their own story. Monsters are just a matter of perspective.

Solitude is its own kind of madness. Like hope itself.

Dogs were with us from the very beginning. And of all the animals that walked the long centuries beside us, they always walked the closest. And then they paid the price. Fuck us.

Never trust someone who tells good stories, not until you know why they're doing it.

Ends happen fast, and often arrive before you've been warned they're coming.

With so many marvels around you, did you stop seeing some of them?

Even the wide sea and the open sky can be claustrophobic if you never get away from them.

Forgetting is a kind of betrayal, even if it’s what happens to all grief. Time wears everything smoother as it grinds past, I suppose.

... even a question can be a lie if asked in the right way.

But the thing about maybes is that you can get lost in them and end up going nowhere.

brain can hold anything, from giant things, like distant stars and planets, to tiny things we can’t see, like germs. A brain can even hold things that aren’t and never were, like hobbits. A brain can hold the whole universe, a fist just holds what little it can grab. Or hits what it can’t.

If we’re not loyal to the things we love, what’s the point? That’s like not having a memory. That’s when we stop being human.

I realise how much time I used to spend with my head in a book, filling the emptiness of my world and letting the pages distract from the darkness in the shadows behind me.

You can fall out of your own safe life that quickly, and nothing you thought you knew will ever be the same again.

Nothing’s perfect. Especially not me. I’m just like you were. Human. Hanging on. Holding out for a happy ending. But knowing it ends badly. And then being surprised by joy.

We're out here on the wrong side of a dying world trying to piece together the story of what's happened from torn fragments that we can only snatch at as they flutter past us in the wind.

It came to me that I hadn't known I had been being less than I could have been until then, when I saw there was so much more of the world for me to be myself within.

In the end, I realised it was about mourning someone and being betrayed by a second of happiness that makes you forget your loss for a moment, and then feeling worse because that unthinking instant of happiness ends up feeling like a betrayal of the lost one.

Remembering dreams is like picking up small jellyfish—they slip through your fingers—and you never know if it’s a dream you had or if you added to the dream in the remembering. Sometimes it’s hard to know if you’re remembering a dream at all, or just a dream about remembering a dream. And if that doesn’t make sense, well, neither do dreams.

Of all the animals that travelled the long road through the ages with us, dogs always walked closest.

Gods are just stories now. Bar said that’s all they really were anyway: stories to make sense of lives of those who wanted someone else to take charge of them, rather than cut their own way.

Does absence have a weight?

I didn't know what to do next. Doing something is always the best way to think

I found a few books I knew which was like meeting old friends in a strange place,

the only answers that are useful are the ones that will help us survive into the future.

Forewarned is not forearmed. Sometimes you spend so much effort looking for the track that you know is there, that you miss the other one that you didn’t know about.

Reading is another way we survive. It helps to know where we came from, how we got here. And most of all, for me, even though these low and empty islands are all I have ever known, when I open the front cover of a new book, it’s like a door, and I can travel far away in place and time.

I decided I liked squirrels just as much as Jip did, but in a completely different way.

Better a brain than a fist. A brain can hold anything, from giant things, like distant stars and planets, to tiny things we can’t see, like germs. A brain can even hold things that aren’t and never were, like hobbits. A brain can hold the whole universe, a fist just holds what little it can grab. Or hits what it can’t.