The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

animal’s, raw, pitiful, incoherent. Not much of a hero, am I? thought Tian. I wish I were truly brave. You’re an ordinary man who was given an extraordinary choice, said the Monkey King.

He looked old—a quality that children are among the last to notice about their parents—and

[A] photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. —SUSAN SONTAG

Yet, history was not merely deep patterns and the long now. There was also a time and a place where individuals could leave an extraordinary impact.

In some sense I felt that I had become like a turtle, with a shell around me that kept me from feeling anything.

And so the Quatzoli are themselves books. Each carries within its stone brain a written record of the accumulated wisdom of all its ancestors: the most durable thoughts that have survived millions of years of erosion. Each mind grows from a seed inherited through the millennia, and every thought leaves a mark that can be read and seen.

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

The fact that we can never have complete, perfect knowledge does not absolve us of the moral duty to judge and to take a stand against evil.

Pockets of sentience glow in the cold, deep void of the universe like bubbles in a vast, dark sea. Tumbling, shifting, joining and breaking, they leave behind spiraling phosphorescent trails, each as unique as a signature, as they push and rise toward an unseen surface. Everyone makes books.