The World Is Full Of Things That

An Iceberg Is Water Striving To Be Land; A Mountain, Especially A Himalaya, Especially Everest, Is Land's Attempt To Metamorphose Into Sky; It Is Grounded In Flight, The Earth Mutated--nearly--into Air, And Become, In The True Sense, Exalted. Long Before She Ever Encountered The Mountain, Allie Was Aware Of Its Brooding Presence In Her Soul.

The Real Risks For Any Artist Are Taken In Pushing The Work To The Limits Of What Is Possible, In The Attempt To Increase The Sum Of What It Is Possible To Think. Books Become Good When They Go To This Edge And Risk Falling Over It -when They Endanger The Artist By Reason Of What He Has, Or Has Not, Artistically Dared.

When A Reader Falls In Love With A Book, It Leaves Its Essence Inside Him, Like Radioactive Fallout In An Arable Field, And After That There Are Certain Crops That Will No Longer Grow In Him, While Other, Stranger, More Fantastic Growths May Occasionally Be Produced.

We Look Up And We Hope The Stars Look Down, We Pray That There May Be Stars For Us To Follow, Stars Moving Across The Heavens And Leading Us To Our Destiny, But It's Only Our Vanity. We Look At The Galaxy And Fall In Love, But The Universe Cares Less About Us Than We Do About It, And The Stars Stay In Their Courses However Much We May Wish Upon Them To Do Otherwise. It's True That If You Watch The Sky-wheel Turn For A While You'll See A Meteor Fall, Flame And Die. That's Not A Star Worth Following; It's Just An Unlucky Rock. Our Fates Are Here On Earth. There Are No Guiding Stars.

Human Beings, You See, Do Absolutely Two Primary Things. We See Like And Unlike. Like Becomes, In Literature, Simile And Metaphor. Unlike Becomes Uniqueness And Difference, From Which I Believe, The Novel Is Born.