Anybody can make up past lives, she said. The real trick is to make up future lives & not forget you did it.

The future is a funny thing, she told me one day, because we’re the only ones who care about it.

I’m very broad minded usually, she said, but it gets very narrow & fast in spots.

Everything changed the day he figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in his life.

He told me one time he forgot himself & his heart opened up like a door with a loose latch & he tried for days to put it all back in proper order but finally he gave up & left it all jumbled up there in a pile & loved everything equally.

My favorite thing is saying something true, he said, but I’m a lot younger than you & don’t have to worry so much about my reputation.

We lay there & looked up at the night sky & she told me about stars called blue squares & red swirls & I told her I’d never heard of them. Of course not, she said, the really important stuff they never tell you. You have to imagine it on your own.

What would happen if all the time everyone was naked? my son said & I said that I, for one, would stay at home & cook more in the wintertime

this is a picture of the future & you’ll notice that there’s a lot of blank space because people haven’t made up their minds about it & the future doesn’t have a lot of time for that kind of indecisiveness

I don’t read the paper & I don’t watch tv & people ask me how I stay up with what’s going on & I tell them breathing seems to help & since I haven’t done serious damage to anyone yet, they usually leave me alone.

Of course I act like a barbarian, he said. They’re the only ones who have any fun in this life.

I was going to be the solar system, she said, but I kept getting caught in the trees & bushes.

In my dream, the angel shrugged & said, If we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination & then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand.

She said she usually cried at least once each day not because she was sad, but because the world was so beautiful & life was so short.

If you hold on to the handle, she said, it’s easier to maintain the illusion of control. But it’s more fun if you just let the wind carry you.

They came to sit & dangle their feet off the edge of the world & after awhile they forgot everything but the good & true things they would do someday.

…gleaned on http://www.storypeople.com/