The Ten Thousand Doors of January

I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.

The will to be polite, to maintain civility and normalcy, is fearfully strong. I wonder sometimes how much evil is permitted to run unchecked simply because it would be rude to interrupt it.

It’s a profoundly strange feeling, to stumble across someone whose desires are shaped so closely to your own, like reaching toward your reflection in a mirror and finding warm flesh under your fingertips. If you should ever be lucky enough to find that magical, fearful symmetry, I hope you’re brave enough to grab it with both hands and not let go.

Let that be a lesson to you: If you are too good and too quiet for too long, it will cost you. It will always cost you, in the end.

May she wander but always return home, may all her words be written true, may every door lie open before her.

Destiny is a pretty story we tell ourselves. Lurking beneath it there are only people, and the terrible choices we make.

Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books -- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles -- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn't about reading the words; it's about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-colour prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, or literary weight or unsolved mysteries.

Maybe all powerful men are cowards at heart, because in their hearts they know power is temporary.

How fitting, that the most terrifying time in my life should require me to do what I do best: escape into a book.

Cats, I have found, seem to exist in more or less the same form in every world; it is my belief that they have been slipping in and out of doors for several thousand years. Anyone familiar with house cats will know this is a particular hobby of theirs.

I happen to believe every story is a love story if you catch it at the right moment, slantwise in the light of dusk[.]

It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.

There is nothing quite like the anger of someone very powerful, who has been thwarted by someone who was supposed to be weak.

Books are Doors and I wanted out.

Worlds were never meant to be prisons, locked and suffocating and safe. Worlds were supposed to be great rambling houses with all the windows thrown open and the wind and summer rain rushing through them, with magic passages in their closets and secret treasure chests in their attics.

They always end up alone in the stories—witches, I mean—living in the woods or mountains or locked in towers. I suppose it would take a brave man to love a witch, and most men are cowards.

Sometimes I feel there are doors lurking in the creases of every sentence, with periods for knobs and verbs for hinges.

the place you are born isn't necessarily the place you belong.

Once we have agreed that true love exists, we may consider its nature. It is not, as many misguided poets would have you believe an event in and of itself; it is not something that happens, but something that simply is and always has been. One does not fall in love; one discovers it.

Words and their meanings have weight in the world of matter, shaping and reshaping realities through a most ancient alchemy.

I wanted wide-open horizons and worn shoes and strange constellations spinning above me like midnight riddles. I wanted danger and mystery and adventure.

I hope to every god you have the guts to do what needs doing. I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through. I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics. I hope you will run through every open Door, and tell stories when you return.

If you are wondering why other worlds seem so brimful of magic compared to your own dreary Earth, consider how magical this world seems from another perspective. To a world of sea people, your ability to breathe air is stunning; to a world of spear throwers, your machines are demons harnessed to work tirelessly in your service; to a world of glaciers and clouds, summer itself is a miracle.

There's only one way to run away from your own story, and that's to sneak into someone else's. I unwedged the leatherbound book from beneath my mattress and breathed in the ink-and-adventure smell of it. I walked through it into another world.

Freedom isn't worth a single solitary shit if it isn't shared.

I should have known: destiny is a pretty story we tell ourselves. Lurking beneath it there are only people, and the terrible choices we make.

Sentences may alter the weather, and poems might tear down walls. Stories may change the world.

The trouble with you people,’ I observed, ‘is that you believe in permanence. An orderly world will remain so; a closed door will remain closed.’ I shook my head, reaching for the door. ‘It’s very … limiting.

Second, my long years of research have taught me that all stories, even the meanest folktales, matter. They are artifacts and palimpsests, riddles and histories. They are the red threads that we may follow out of the labyrinth.

My father—who is a true scholar and not just a young lady with an ink pen and a series of things she has to say—puts it much better: “If we address stories as archaeological sites, and dust through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.