Strange the Dreamer

You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters." “Beautiful and full of monsters?" “All the best stories are.

It was impossible, of course. But when did that ever stop any dreamer from dreaming.

I think you’re a fairy tale. I think you’re magical, and brave, and exquisite. And I hope you'll let me be in your story.

I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar.

He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn't sleep at all.

And that's how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.

Without his books, his room felt like a body with its hearts cut out.

You think good people can't hate?" she asked. "You think good people don't kill?"[...}"Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It's just that when they do them, they call it justice.

Life won't just happen to you boy, he said. You have to happen to it.

The library knows its own mind... When it steals a boy, we let it keep him.

There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms.

What's the point of being old if you can't beleaguer the young with your vast stores of wisdom? And what's the point of being young if you can't ignore all advice?

He looked him right in the eyes and saw a man who was great and good and human, who had done extraordinary things and terrible things and been broken and reassembled as a shell, only then to do the bravest thing of all: He had kept on living, though there are easier paths to take.

Sometimes a moment is so remarkable that it carves out a space in time and spins there, while the world rushes on around it. This was one such.

As for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths - intrusions of reality into fantasy, like toast crumbs on a wizard's beard.

He had loved the library, and had felt, as a boy, as though it had a kind of sentience, and perhaps loved him back. But even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.

On the occasions that he did look up from the page, he would seem as though he were awakening from a dream.

He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant.

And they gazed at themselves in it, side by side and hand in hand, and they beheld neither gods nor monsters. They were so nearly unchanged, and yet that one thing - the color of their skin - would, in the real world, change everything.

Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It's just that when they do them, they call it justice.

It might have been brief, but so much of a kiss - a first kiss especially - is the moment before your lips touch, and before your eyes close, when you're filled with the sight of each other, and with the compulsion, the pull, and it's like...it's like...finding a book inside another book. A small treasure of a book hidden inside a big common one - like...spells printed on dragonfly wings, discovered tucked inside a cookery book, right between the recipes for cabbages and corn. That's what a kiss is like, he thought, no matter how brief: It's a tiny, magical story, and a miraculous interruption of the mundane.

He wasn't an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about.

The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around

It was a different life out here, but make no mistake: Lazlo was every bit the dreamer he had always been, if not more. He might have left his books, but he carried all his stories with him.

If you're afraid of your own dreams, you're welcome here in mine.

It was cruel. Like opening a birdcage to let the bird fly out, whilst all the while it's tethered by the leg, and freedom is only an illusion.

He drifted about with his head full of myths, always at least half lost in some otherland of story. Demons and wingsmiths, seraphim and spirits, he love it all.

Lazlo. You have to wake up now, my love. And he did.

He dreamed of deserts and great empty cities and imagined he could feel the minutes and hours of his life running through him, as though he were nothing but an hourglass of flesh and bone.