The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

This is what his mother would call a moment with meaning. A moment that changes the moments that follow.

boy at the beginning of a story has no way of knowing that the story has begun.

Reading a novel, he supposes, is like playing a game where all the choices have been made for you ahead of time by someone who is much better at this particular game. (Though he sometimes wishes choose-your-own-adventure novels would come back into fashion.)

“Everyone is a part of a story, what they want is to be part of something worth recording. It’s that fear of mortality, ‘I Was Here and I Mattered’ mind-set.”

“Poetry,” Mirabel repeats. “The weather. It’s like a poem. Where each word is more than one thing at once and everything’s a metaphor. The meaning condensed into rhythm and sound and the spaces between sentences. It’s all intense and sharp, like the cold and the wind.”

He wants to take the book into his home, into his life, into his bed because he cannot do the same with the girl who gave it to him.

“We are the stars,” he answers, as though it is the most obvious of facts afloat in a sea of metaphors and misdirections. “We are all stardust and stories.”