“eventually these encounters forced him to acknowledge the reality of fate, and the truth inherent in things of the imagination.”

“Never downplay the power and importance of imagination. Nothing manifests in your reality without having been imagined first. Every single thing that you eventually come to life has been imagined first.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that people write the darnedest things in the margins of their books.”

“The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory — of this there is no doubt.”

“Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”

“Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.”