In an Absent Dream

If you want to help her, you need to help yourself first. No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion.

Enjoy yourself. There are many good things in the world, and each of them happens for the first time only once, and never again.

She was ordinary. She was remarkable. Of such commonplace contradictions are weapons made.

Children are capable of grasping complex ideas long before most people give them credit for, wrapping them in a soothing layer of nonsense and illogical logic. To be a child is to be a visitor from another world muddling your way through the strange rules of this one, where up is always up, even when it would make more sense for it to be down, or backward, or sideways.

Sometimes 'fair' is bigger than just you. Sometimes ‘fair’ has to think about what’s best for everyone.

She discovered the pure joy of reading for pleasure, and was rarely - if ever - seen without a book in her hand. Even in slumber, she was often to be found clutching a volume with one slender hand, her fingers wrapped right around its spine, as if she feared to wake into a world where all books had been forgotten and removed, and this book might become the last she had to linger over.

Following the rules didn't make you a good person, just like breaking them didn't make you a bad one, but it could make you an invisible person, and invisible people got to do as they liked.

Let us speak, for a moment, on the matter of sisters. They can be enemies to fight or companions to lean upon: they can, at times, be strangers. They are not required to be friends, or to have involvement in one another's lives, or to be anything more than strangers united by the circumstances of their birth. Still, there is a magic in the word "sister," a magic which speaks of shared roots and hence shared branches, of a certain ease that is always to be pursued, if not always to be found.

There is wanting and there is needing, and when you want, you can make good choices, but when you need, it’s important the people around you not be looking to take advantage.

In the way of bookish children, she carried her books into trees and along the banks of chuckling creeks, weaving her way along their slippery shores with the sort of grace that belongs only to bibliophiles protecting their treasures.

Reality, it must sadly be said, has a way of complicating things, even things we might believe could never be that complicated.

Books were precious things, meant to be treated well, both because they deserved it and because if she didn't treat them well, her parents might stop buying them for her.

What’s the Goblin Market?” “It is a place where dreamers go when they don’t fit in with the dreams their homes think worth dreaming. Doors lead here. Perhaps you found one.

Your name is your heart, and you don’t give your heart away.

IT CAN BE EASY, when hearing about someone else’s adventures in a far-off, magical land, to say “I would never choose the mundane world over the fantastical. I would run into rivers of rainbow as fast as my legs would carry me, and I would never once look back.” It is so often easy, when one has the luxury of being sure a thing will never happen, to be equally sure of one’s answers.

No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion.

Mysteries in books were the best kind. The real world was absolutely full of boring mysteries, questions that never got answered and lost things that never got found. That wasn't allowed, in books. In books, mysteries were always interesting and exciting, packed with daring and danger, and in the end, the good guys found the clues and the bad guys got their comeuppance. Best of all, nothing was ever lost forever. If something mattered enough for the author to write it down, it would always come back before the last page was turned. It would always come back.

You forgot that sometimes, fair value comes from change, and death, and sacrifice. You can't have everything and give fair value. You can't stop your clock and expect to stay a part of the world.

Home always shrinks in times of absence, always bleeds away some of its majesty, because what is home, after all, apart from the place one returns to when the adventure is over? Home is an end to glory, a stopping point when the tale is done.

She was Katherine, she was the teacher's pet, and when she grew up, she was going to be a librarian, because she couldn't imagine knowing there was a job that was all about books and not wanting to do it.

The Market knows, you see, when someone is acting to the best of their ability. The Market doesn't punish us for having limitations. It only reminds us that fair value applies to everyone.

It is so often easy, when one has the luxury of being sure a thing will never happen, to be equally sure of one's answers.

Wood does not customarily glitter. Few things do, unless they are attempting to lure something closer to themselves. Sparkle and shine are pleasures reserved for predators, who can afford the risk of courting attention. The exceptions - which exist, for all things must have exceptions - are almost entirely poisonous, and will sicken whatever they lure. So even the exception feeds into the rule, which states that a bright, shimmering thing is almost certainly looking to be seen, and that which hopes to be seen is persuing its own agenda.

There is a choice here, hanging like smoke in the autumn air. She can cry for the friends she doesn't have, mourn for the games she isn't playing, or she can let them go. She can be the kind of girl who doesn't need anyone else to keep her happy, the kind of girl who smiles at adults and keeps her own company. She can be content.

There are many good things in the world, and each of them happens for the first time only once, and never again.

Paperwork is a magic in and of itself. It makes spouses out of strangers, makes homes out of houses.

That’s because you don’t know what fairness means. You’ve been in a place that wasn’t fair for so long that the things we’d been trying to teach you have been driven back into the shadows.

It is enough," she said finally. "But there will be another, less tangible cost." "Anything," said Lundy. "That word, that promise, strike it from your tongue," said the Archivist. "With that word, I could ask for the heart in your chest and the blood in your veins and you could not stop me. There is no value fair enough to warrant an open check.

It is an interesting thing, to trust one's feet. The heart may yearn for adventure while the head thinks sensibly of home, but the feet are a mixture of the two, dipping first one way and then the other.

She didn't want to be someone they could care for. She didn't want to be a Kate or a Kitty or even a Kat - all perfectly lovely, serviceable names, for perfectly lovely, serviceable people. People she already knew, at six years of age, that she didn't want to be. She was Katherine Lundy. Her family loved her as Katherine Lundy. If the children in the yard next door or on the playground couldn't find her worth loving the same way, she wasn't going to change for them.