“The man on the ceiling casts shadows of flesh, and sometimes the shadows take on lives of their own.”

“Stories are masks of God.That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm.Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them.”

“Everything changes your life.”

“Everything is dangerous. Even in your dreams. Even if you sleep without dreams. From the moment you jump out of bed and take that first breath. Something terrible might happen. Someone's bound to die before the story is over. You might even fall in love."-The Man On The Ceiling”

“Imagination transforms one substance into another. It changes what is into what might be, what was into what might have been. Straw becomes gold, gold straw, and neither is more real nor, I submit, more precious than the other. Pebbles turn into luminous pearls and pearls into little gray rocks, both solid and beautiful, both essential. Human beings take shape from clay, angels' wings are spun out of water, fire gives rise to the long tongues of demons, love emerges out of thin air, and the basic elements reconstitute themselves again and again."-The Man In The Ceiling”

“For so long I have lived on the edge of an invisible world. Sometimes I feel like the scattered debris left over after the personality has fallen out of the sky.”

“One voice whispered Beloved. She spread her colors on the starshine to embrace this land he had given her, and there were no shadows to darken the Fire soaring across the sand. Only light, only joy.No one heard Elisel scream. Only the dragons saw her rise into the night sky like an arrow, mute after that one keening wail. It was two days before she returned to Skybowl.Long before that, they found Sioned.”