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“It is possible that our race may be an accident, in a meaningless universe, living its brief life uncared for, on this dark, cooling star: but even so - and all the more - what marvelous creatures we are! What fairy story, what tale from the Arabian Nights of the jinns, is a hundredth part as wonderful as this true fairy story of simians! It is so much more heartening, too, than the tales we invent. A universe capable of giving birth to many such accidents is - blind or not - a good world to live in, a promising universe. . . . We once thought we lived on God's footstool, it may be a throne.”

“That's what Hanukkah is about: trying to survive the darkness on the far-fetched hope there's still some life and light left in the universe. It's more than just a religious story. The days have been growing shorter, imperceptibly but inescapably darker.... Heading into the night of the winter solstice, every spiritual tradition has some kind of festival of light. We're all just whistling in the dark, hoping against hope that someone up there will see these little Hanukkah candles and get the hint.”

“Travel is the realm of the impossible adventures, the quick fix, the ship passing in the night. It entitles you to meet interesting people, whom you would never meet, even if you laid traps or advertised for them. Not only do you met them, but you also unmeet them, all in the space of, it often seems, a mere compacted evening. As there is so little time, bodies in motion drop their guard and immediately get on with their stories. Then the proverbial ships part, each to its destination, never again to brush each other's wake.”

“Synonyms know each other like old colleagues, like a set of friends who've seen the world together. They swap stories, reminisce about their origins and forget that though they are similar, they are entirely different, and though they share a certain set of attributes, one can never be the other. Because a quiet night is not the same as a silent one, a firm man is not the same as a steady one, and a bright light is not the same as a brilliant one because the way they wedge themselves into a sentence changes everything.”

“When I found out that Santa Claus wasn't real, I wasn't upset; rather, I was relieved that there was a much simpler phenomenon to explain how so many children all over the world got presents on the same night! The story had been getting pretty complicated -- it was getting out of hand.”

“Honor thy Father and thy Mother was once said, but then someone said: What if I don't know your Father? A still voice said: Does that makes him the devil? He is still someone's Father, his name has been changed, but his story is the same. Why hate when we should Celebrate. In this world of two's, you got the Mourning Son, and the Daughter of the Night. They both equal light once you make it through the night. Now, wake the funk up!”

“You always hear about fashion's success stories. How a starlet lost an earring one night and by the next morning, the entire country was wearing one earring. Or how sweaters made a comeback in a drugstore, or a First Lady influenced how we dressed during her reign. But what about the losers? The fashions that came and went out the same day? The hopes and dreams of designers that were shattered by the sound of fifty million women ... laughing themselves to death.”

“I think it's wonderful when a love story begins with a great deal of romance and affection, passion and excitement, that's how it should be. But I don't necessarily know that it's the wisest thing in the world to expect that it ends there, or that it should, 30 years down the road, still look as it did on the night of your first kiss.”

“One night, I was lying in bed, and I was channel surfing between reality TV programs and actual war coverage. On one channel, there's a group of young people competing for I don't even know; and on the next, there's a group of young people fighting in an actual war. I was really tired, and the lines between these stories started to blur in a very unsettling way. That's the moment when Katniss's story came to me.”

“I think what drove me away from being a reporter was an inability to accept that the world came in neat stories. Every story you have to report is just part of something bigger. The news isn't what happened last night - it's some cumulative thing that's happened over centuries. I found it hard to think of one event and drag it out of a bubbling pot and present it as the story that explains it all.”

“I've been thinking of a story from the Old Testament: Moses stood all day and all night with outstretched arms, praying to God for victory. And whenever he let down his arms, the enemy prevailed over the children of Israel. Are there still people today who never weary of directing all their thinking and all their energy, single-heartedly, to one cause?”

“I think the actor has a tribal role as the archetypal story teller. I think there was a time when the storyteller, the priest, the healer, were all one person in one body. That person used to weave stories at night around a small fire to keep the tribe from being terrified that sun had gone down.”