The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H.G. Parry

He had come into the world trailing dreams and stories and improbabilities,

“Heathcliff isn’t much on specificity,” Millie said. “If he wants a boiled egg, he’ll hint darkly at the metaphorical properties of chickens, and rage at the body’s need for sustenance despite the ravages of the soul.”

“It would be like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Charley said. “People write about fairies; because they’ve been written, they’re read out of books; and then they’re in the world, and people write stories about them. We’ve read our own myths into the world.”

“That’s the danger of stories,” Mum said. Lydia and I weren’t the only ones thinking about Charley, obviously. “They bring things into the world, and they can’t be put away again.”

And… you know when you read a book, sometimes, and you suddenly realize that you’ve been missing something your whole life, and you weren’t even aware, and all at once you’ve found it and are just a little bit more whole?”

What you need to understand about protagonists, Sutherland, is that we’re all busy with our own plots.

I’m not sure if it was my temper I lost or something else, because I was furious but I was crying too.

if you have any bizarrely literal metaphorical traits that might come in handy, this would be an excellent time to use them.”