The Ten Thousand Doors of January

other, older words—like chaos and revolution—still lingered in the margins.

Something about having a child bends you back to your beginnings, as if you have been drawing a circle all your life and now are compelled to close it.

There’s only one way to run away from your own story, and that’s to sneak into someone else’s.

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.

Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries.

Doors are revolutions and upheavals, uncertainties and mysteries, axis points around which entire worlds can be turned. They are the beginnings and endings of every true story, the passages between that lead to adventures and madness and—here he smiled—even love. Without doors the worlds would grow stagnant, calcified, storyless.

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.

freedom isn’t worth a single solitary shit if it isn’t shared.

It felt like donning a suit of armor or sprouting wings, extending past the boundaries of myself; it felt an awful lot like love.