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Maybe when you give up your dreams, you find out that there’s more to life than dreaming. He was going to live in the real world from now on, and he was going to learn to appreciate its rough, mundane solidity.

But that was the thing about the old days: they were old. This was his life now. He was content, and if not happy then happier than he ever thought he’d be again. He had work to do….The past was what it was, his home was here, and anything else was a fantasy.

Life was briskly and efficiently stripping Quentin of his last delusions about himself, one by one, shucking them off in firm hard jerks like wet clothes, leaving him naked and shivering.

Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.

When he graduated he’d thought life was going to be like a novel, starring him on his own personal hero’s journey, and that the world would provide him with an endless series of evils to triumph over and life lessons to learn. It took him a while to figure out that wasn’t how it worked.

This was bad behavior, and she knew it. She did it because she was angry and because she disliked herself. The more she disliked herself, the more she took it out on other people, and the more she took it out on other people the more she disliked herself.

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.

But you couldn’t mourn forever. Or you could, but as it turned out there were better things to do.

Could the man really not have explained? Did his daughter really not understand what had happened? It didn’t add up. If they’d talked about it and figured things out it could have been a happy ending. People in fairy tales never just figured things out.

There was a lot to do. Death was an existential catastrophe, a rip in the soft upholstery with which humanity padded over a hard uncaring universe, but it turned out there were an amazing number of people whose job it was to deal with it for you, and all they asked in return were huge quantities of time and money.

The war we are losing is with time.

“Be careful what you learn from me,” he said. “What is written with a sword cannot be erased.”