The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

It is the possibility of our minds touching that makes writing a worthwhile endeavor at all.

It was like her mother’s, floral and sweet, but also bright, like blankets dried in the sun.

Lilly shook her head. Boys were simple, and fists could do the talking for them. The magic of words between girls was much more complicated.

“Yet it is this awareness of the closeness of death, of the beauty inherent in each moment, that allows us to endure. Mono no aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe. It is the soul of our nation.

He’s just using these people as research tools, a human flesh-powered, crowdsourced search engine. It’s almost funny how people are so willing to give perfect strangers over the Internet information, would even compete with each other to do it, to show how knowledgeable they are. He’s pleased to make use of such petty vanities.

“Though we were not born on the same day of the same month of the same year, we ask that Fate give us the satisfaction of dying on the same second of the same minute of the same hour.”

It means that sometimes you can’t become friends until you’ve fought each other.”

hospital afterward. “A lot of people were angry at my parents, saying they were reckless and irresponsible to endanger a child like that. But I’m forever grateful to them. They gave me the greatest gift parents could give to a child: fearlessness.

When two Esoptrons encounter each other, they may merge temporarily, a tunnel forming between their membranes. This kissing union can last hours, days, or years, as their memories are awakened and exchanged with energy contributions from both members. The pleasurable ones are selectively duplicated in a process much like protein expression—the serp

“The fading sunlight holds infinite beauty Though it is so close to the day’s end.”