My Commonplace Book

“There is a dark resource within all of us, a reservoir of hurt and pain and anger upon which we can draw when the need arises. Most of us rarely, if ever, have to delve too deeply into it. That is as it should be because dipping into it costs, and you lose a little of yourself each time, a small part of all that is good and honorable and decent about you, each time you use it you have to go a little deeper, a little further down into the blackness. Strange creatures move through its depth, illuminated by a burning light from within and fueled only by the desire to survive and to kill. The danger in diving into that pool, in drinking from the dark water, is that one day you may submerge yourself so deeply that you can never find the surface again. Give in to it and you’re lost forever.” – John Connolly, The Killing Kind

“For here, on the other side, one gets the feeling that one’s former life persists. Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I’d been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.” – Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

“I look back over what I’ve written and I know it’s wrong, not because of what I’ve set down, but because of what I’ve omitted. What isn’t there has a presence, like the absence of light.” – Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin