If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.
Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.
We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.
On a fading summer evening, late in the last hours of his old life, Peter Jaxon-son of Demetrius and Prudence Jaxon, First Family; descendent of Terrence Jaxon, signatory of the One Law; great-great-nephew of the one known as Auntie, Last of the First; Peter of Souls, the Man of Days and the One Who Stood-took his position on the catwalk above Main Gate, waiting to kill his brother.
Rust, corrosion, wind, rain. The nibbling teeth of mice and the acrid droppings of insects and the devouring jaws of years. The was of nature upon machines, of the planet's chaotic forces upon the works of humankind. The energy that man had pulled from the earth was being inexorably pulled back into it, sucked like water down a drain. Before long, if it hadn't happened already, not a single high-tension pole would be left standing on the earth. Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out.
My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.
This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.
What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.
Even on the darkest night, my friend, life will have its way.
I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.
Because that's what heaven is...it's opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there.
So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.
One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.
As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.
It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.
A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand stories - of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief. Beds slept in and meals eaten, and the bliss and pain of the body, and a view of summer leaves from a window on a morning it had rained; the nights of loneliness and the nights of love, the soul in it's body keeping always longing to be known.
And indeed, I am a warmhearted and thoroughly domestic man who gets up and makes pancakes for his children and kisses them on the head when he sends them off to their day.
I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.
I was very much a child of the Cold War.
I saw my one purpose in that moment, looking into that little girls eyes. I was the one who was meant to save her, that was my one purpose all this time.
I think many years ago I got on a bus in L.A. and drove around to see the stars' homes, but that's the extent of my direct experience in Hollywood.
He breathed once more, holding the air in his chest, as if it were not air but something more--a sweet taste of freedom, of all cares lifted, everything over and done.
It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.
So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.
I was a 'Planet of the Apes'-obsessed kid.
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