The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

you know when you read a book, sometimes, and you suddenly realize that you’ve been missing something your whole life, and you weren’t even aware, and all at once you’ve found it and are just a little bit more whole?

Every supporting character is the protagonist of his own story.

I thought you said everything in a book has meaning.” “It does! That doesn’t mean it means what you want it to mean!

It scares the living daylights out of everybody. Present company excepted, I’m sure.” “I don’t really do living or daylight,” Dorian said. “I’m a Gothic masterpiece.

I don’t care what everyone says, damaging books is worse than damaging people. People heal up. Books never do. The marks always show.

History is every bit as much of a story as fiction.

What we see when we look at people is just a bundle of our own interpretations

Truth, at least complete truth, isn’t held in words. But there would be no truth at all without them. It lies behind them and lurks around them and shines through them, in glimpses of metaphor, and connotation, and story.

Kind people don't make things happen. They try to prevent bad things from happening, and they fail, and they live in fear of that failure. So do those under their protection

There is not a poem on earth that doesn't make sense to anyone.

There are coincidences in life, not in books. Everything in a book is placed there for a reason. What’s the reason for this one?

As I recall,” Millie said, “in your book, your secret isn’t revealed until you stab your painting in the heart.” He shrugged. “That’s how all secrets are revealed, in the end. Either someone else betrays us, or we betray ourselves.

We love Dickens because he tell us stories, and because he tell us that we are all stories. We are. We are more than stories, of course. But we have to start somewhere. And there are many worse places to start than, 'Chapter One: I am Born. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that stations will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

Something has to be heard to be ignored. He heard me this time, and he ignored me.

We’ve read our own myths into the world.

She's from a children's book," Charley pointed out. "That makes her by definition more capable than most adults.

When he sees himself through your eyes, he reinterprets himself,

What you need to understand about protagonists, Sutherland, is that we’re all busy with our own plots. We can’t help it; we’re not used to sharing our stories.

Books don’t hurt people.” “What comes out of them jolly well does.

That’s the danger of stories,” Mum said. Lydia and I weren’t the only ones thinking about Charley, obviously. “They bring things into the world, and they can’t be put away again.

And while I’m reading, the new words I’m taking in will connect to others already taken in. That reference to blue is the third this chapter, and it always goes with wealth. That phrase is from the poem earlier. Deeper. That’s a reference to the myth of Orpheus. That’s a pairing of two words that don’t usually go together. Wider. That’s a symbol Dickens employs often. That typifies Said’s writings on Orientalism. Points of light. They make a map, or a pattern, or a constellation. Formless, intricate, infinitely complex, and lovely. And then, at once, they’ll connect. They’ll meet, and explode. Of course. That’s the entire point. That’s how the story works, the way each sentence and metaphor and reference feeds into the other to illuminate something important. That explosion of discovery, of understanding, is the most intoxicating moment there is. Emotional, intellectual, aesthetic. Just for a moment, a perfect moment, a small piece of the world makes perfect sense.

There's truth in anything. It's the truth of a single moment in time. It's as if someone made a painting of you based on photograph. The photograph would be an accurate picture of you; the painting would be a valid interpretation of that photograph. Nobody's lying, but that painting isn't you, not all of you. It's just a picture.

It was quiet as I settled in to read alongside Sherlock Holmes and David Copperfield. But for the crackle of the fire and the ever-present whistle of the wind outside, it was as quiet as it had been in the city, after everything changed. And for a moment, the space between heartbeats, I felt I could glimpse the world Charley saw. A world of light and shadow, of fact, truth and story, each blurring into one another as sleep and wakefulness blur in the early morning. The moments of our lives unfolding as pages in a book. And everything connected, everyone joined, by an ever-shifting web of language, by words that caught us as prisms caught light and reflected back at ourselves.

But I need to reassure the others first. They’ll be all out of sorts.” “Reassure them of what?” “Oh, you know,” she said. “Everything’s perfectly all right, that sort of thing.” “And is it?” Charley asked. “Of course not,” she snorted. “If it were, they wouldn’t need me to tell them.

Where the light was strongest, there were no buildings.

The truth here is rarely pure and never simple.

We see what we know is there.

That’s not what Charley says,” I returned. I felt, illogically, that I was scoring a point. “He says that feelings are a mind picking up on things it doesn’t always understand.” “Perhaps. But if so, they are a poor substitute for true understanding.

It’s not fair. It feels good to write it, even if it doesn’t change it. It’s not fair. It’s not fair it’s not fair it’s not fair it’s not FAIR. It’s. Not. Fair. I know that life isn’t. But stories are. Or if they’re not fair, they’re not fair with purpose. I wish I could tell better where stories end and life begins.

Let me try to warn you again. Knowledge is dangerous