Perhaps being too powerful, too unopposed, is a curse in and of itself, leading to boredom and dissipation, and the invention of imaginary enemies whose powers to torment were less limited than those of flesh and blood.

2024 was full of ups and downs, but still read 120 books. Check out all the stats from reading this year and see the best books I read in 2024.

The biggest hits—be they Coca-Cola or Doritos or Kraft’s Velveeta Cheesy Skillets dinner kits—owe their success to formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct overriding single flavor that says to the brain: Enough already!

Parentified children are often referred to as “old souls” —wise and calm beyond their years. But they can pay for their precocity by harboring a squishy center of insecurity and loneliness, a wound formed in their earliest unsupported years.

Monsters and flowers aren’t much different. Sometimes they are hard to tell apart—but a good florist knows what to look for.

When we read, we take in whole eyefuls of words. We gulp them like water.

Sometimes, when things are broken, I find they fix themselves if you just pretend that they are fine and give them time.

Fantasy is a safe space; it is not necessarily what we wish was real. Crucially, in a fantasy we don’t need anyone’s permission other than our own: a fantasy is a deliberate, and usually entirely private, act of both memory and imagination.

There are countless things she would rather be doing. On a night like this, when the blue moon is full and bursting with light like summer fruit, she wants nothing more than to bathe in the moon water that now floods the riverbanks. She wants to sing poorly with no judgment, wearing nothing but the night sky.

You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered.

The best books and book-themed gifts for the holidays!

Our brain’s performance is being gravely manipulated, resulting in behaviors that leave us more lonely, anxious, depressed, distrustful, illness-prone, and overweight than ever before. At the same time, we feel disconnected from ourselves, from others, and from the world at large.

I’m not a murderer, and I’m not even a killer, I simply exaggerate self-protection.

Animals began telling stories of Silver Nose’s nightly journeys and his signal fires. It did not take long for others to start calling him Flame Fox. A being who was black as night during the day and who set fires on fells as the rest of the world was fast asleep.

A helpful introduction to making magic easy and repeatable in your everyday life.

These past forty years have witnessed the twin epidemics of the negative extremes of both of these emotions: addiction (from too much pleasure) and depression (from not enough happiness).

Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that came down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures. And of these histories most fair still in the ears of the Elves is the tale of Beren and Lúthien.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

And that, to me, embraces the very soul of the most important commandment you’ll find anywhere in your Principles of Successful Termination: ‘Do in others as you would have others do you in.’

Quicker and quicker danced the dust. The moonbeams seemed to quiver as they went by me into the mass of gloom beyond. More and more they gathered till they seemed to take dim phantom shapes. And then I started, broad awake and in full possession of my senses, and ran screaming from the place.