The Midnight Library: A Novel

“The reason to get married,” Christman writes,

is because you have met a person interesting enough that, death being inevitable, you’d prefer to experience it with them…

Marrying…was the best choice I’d ever make and that was part of the problem. A good marriage is a eucatastrophe: it ends a phase of your life well but decisively. Things are not the ... See more

We are all just waiting for another universe to collide with ours, to change what we can’t ourselves. It’s interesting how we realize the storm returns to calm, but we see the stars differently now, and we don’t know, and we can’t choose, whose wreckage can do that for us. We all start as strangers, but we forget that we rarely choose who ends up a

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There is always what will turn out to be the life we led, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life (or lives) that never actually happened, that we lived in our minds, the wished-for life (or lives): the risks untaken and the opportunities avoided or unprovided. We refer to them as our unloved lives because somewhere we believe that the

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Perhaps death was not quite the annihilation she had thought. Perhaps it was not so essential that her person or even memories of her person survived. Perhaps the important thing was that her ripples persist, ripples of some act or idea that would help others attain joy and virtue in life, ripples that would fill her with pride and act to counter t

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