I Read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange &

I'm Now Much More Excited About Genre Distinctions. What I Still See Breaking Down Are More The Hierarchical Arrangements Of Genres. That Is, "there Is Literary Fiction, And Then There Are Lesser Genres." I'm Much More Clear On The Idea That Literary Fiction Is Itself A Genre. It Is Not Above Other Genres. It Is Down There In The Muck With All The Other Genres, And It's Doing The Wonderful Things That It Does, But To Give It A Y-axis, To Make It High And Low, Just Seems Absurd. I Stand By That.

That Was The Thing About The World: It Wasn't That Things Were Harder Than You Thought They Were Going To Be, It Was That They Were Hard In Ways That You Didn't Expect.

Most People Carry That Pain Around Inside Them Their Whole Lives, Until They Kill The Pain By Other Means, Or Until It Kills Them. But You, My Friends, You Found Another Way: A Way To Use The Pain. To Burn It As Fuel, For Light And Warmth. You Have Learned To Break The World That Has Tried To Break You.

It's Natural For A Child To Assume That His Or Her Own Childhood Is Unremarkable.

As A Teenager In Brooklyn Quentin Had Often Imagined Himself Engaged In Martial Heroics, But After This He Knew, As A Cold Immutable Fact, That He Would Do Anything Necessary, Sacrificing Whatever Or Whomever He Had To, To Avoid Risking Exposure To Physical Violence. Shame Never Came Into It. He Embraced His New Identity As A Coward. He Would Run In The Other Direction. He Would Lie Down And Cry And Put His Arms Over His Head Or Play Dead. It Didn't Matter What He Had To Do, He Would Do It And Be Glad.