An Artificial Night

"Come here," she said. "I need to hold someone, and you need to be held. Just for a little while, and then we can go on being what we are."

Children`s games are stronger than you remember once you`ve grown up and left them behind. They`re always fair, and never kind.

I`m not a hero; I never have been. I just do what has to be done.
But when you get right down to it, isn`t that the definition of a hero?

I rarely phone ahead. It`s not that I enjoy surprising everyone I know; it`s more that I almost never know where I`m going before I actually get there.

We can`t save them if they don`t want to be saved. It doesn`t work this way.

I paid for the right to bleed when something cuts me.

"How did you get away?"
"I escaped. Isn`t that how one always gets away? One escapes. One takes whatever route is open and gets out. The methods don`t matter."

You can fit four people in a VW bug if they`re friendly; you can manage five if you don`t need oxygen inside the car and six if no one cares about having feeling in their limbs. That`s it, period, you`ve reached the limit.

Sometimes I envy kids for the way they dismiss the things that don`t matter. They still get bogged down in details, but at least they`re different details.

Sometimes doing nothing is the hardest thing of all.

Blind Michael is a child`s terror. When you`re hunting boogeymen, you look for the nets you need in the stories you`ve almost forgotten.

You go alone. You can take any help you find, but you can`t ask for it. You fight with what you have and what you`re given; neither steal nor buy any weapon of any kind. You can take each road once, and only once, and some roads not even that often. You go now. Are you ready?