It’s harder to get by when getting by is all there is.

The one truth you need to know about the end of a machine is that the closer they are to death, the more they act like people.

Existing is the whole point of existence. There’s nothing else to it. No goalpost. No finish line. No final notice that tells you what purpose you really served while you were here. When you stop fighting to exist, you may as well not.

Magic was just something people liked to believe in, something they thought they could feel or sense, something that made everything more than just mechanical certainty. Something that made them more than flesh and bone.

It’s an odd moment the first time you really understand someone, when all of their foibles, eccentricities, and ticks cease to be chaos, and coalesce into something wholly logical.

Everyone had a lesson waiting, and they learned it with blood. Sometimes that’s how it goes. People learn from failure and tragedy, not from success.

Succumbing to our own nature isn’t a choice, it’s our default setting.

What we do in life is one thing. What we do in the face of death is everything else.

And as the sun sank behind the curve of the earth, I crossed my fingers, praying silently to myself. Please let there be magic. Just this once, let me see the magic in the flash. Let me see God in it. Let me see what the point of all this was. Let me see the magic. Please be magic. Please be magic there. Please be... magic.

No thinking thing should be another thing’s property.