Quotes from C.A. Fletcher

even a question can be a lie if asked in the right way.

In the end, I realised it was about mourning someone and being betrayed by a second of happiness that makes you forget your loss for a moment, and then feeling worse because that unthinking instant of happiness ends up feeling like a betrayal of the lost one.

It came to me that I hadn't known I had been being less than I could have been until then, when I saw there was so much more of the world for me to be myself within.

I realise how much time I used to spend with my head in a book, filling the emptiness of my world and letting the pages distract from the darkness in the shadows behind me.

Does absence have a weight?

We're out here on the wrong side of a dying world trying to piece together the story of what's happened from torn fragments that we can only snatch at as they flutter past us in the wind.

If we're not loyal to the things we love, what's the point? That's like not having a memory. That's when we stop being human.

Gods are just stories now. Bar said that's all they really were anyway: stories to make sense of lives of those who wanted someone else to take charge of them, rather than cut their own way.

Remembering dreams is like picking up small jellyfish—they slip through your fingers—and you never know if it's a dream you had or if you added to the dream in the remembering. Sometimes it's hard to know if you're remembering a dream at all, or just a dream about remembering a dream. And if that doesn't make sense, well, neither do dreams.

Nothing's perfect. Especially not me. I'm just like you were. Human. Hanging on. Holding out for a happy ending. But knowing it ends badly. And then being surprised by joy.

Forewarned is not forearmed. Sometimes you spend so much effort looking for the track that you know is there, that you miss the other one that you didn't know about.

I didn't know what to do next. Doing something is always the best way to think

I found a few books I knew which was like meeting old friends in a strange place

the only answers that are useful are the ones that will help us survive into the future.

Of all the animals that travelled the long road through the ages with us, dogs always walked closest.

Books turn out to be pretty durable if they're kept away from damp and rats. They can last hundreds of years, easy. Reading is another way we survive. It helps to know where we came from, how we got here. And most of all, for me, even thought these low and empty islands are all I have ever known, when I open the front cover of a new book, it's like a door, and I can travel far away in place and time.

violence is an ugly thing and in the calmer moments I racked my brains for other ways to get what I wanted. Better a brain than a fist. A brain can hold anything, from giant things like distant stars and planets, to tiny things we can't see, like germs. ... A brain can hold a whole universe, a fist just holds what little it can grab. Or hits what it can't.

It came to me that I hadn't known I had been being less than I could have been until then, when I saw there was so much more of the world for me to be myself