She was starting to suspect that facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future. - Lev Grossman

But of course You can get so much done when everyone thinks You’re dead. No interruptions. No one prays to a dead God, why would they?

This was a double game: he was trying to save his childhood, to preserve it and trap it in amber, but to do that he was calling on things that partook of the world beyond childhood, whose touch would leave him even less innocent than he already was. What would that make him? Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn’t doing it.